|
ISIS Lecture April 10, 2001
Thinking again of life’s miracle
Mae-Wan Ho
Lecture at Schumacher College
10th Anniversary Celebration,
The Prince’s Trust, Charlotte
Road, London, April 7, 2001.
Imagine a fire-breathing dragon a mile long flying straight as an arrow
across the evening sky. The night goddess, annoyed at the disturbance, casts a
silken veil in its path. The head of the dragon hits the veil, but the veil
does not rip apart. Instead, the dragon is absorbed into the fabric. In almost
no time at all, the entire dragon has vanished, its roar replaced by an eerie
silence. The night goddess smiles enigmatically and waits. Then, a slight
flicker of her delicate hand, and whuarr! The head of the fiery dragon comes
blasting out to continue on its way, but missing the rest of its body. The
goddess laughs and flicks the veil again, and out comes the dragon’s
trunk. Finally, after another pause, she releases the dragon’s tail. The
mighty dragon has been permanently dismembered for violating the peace of the
heavens.
I have been describing the remarkable experiment with laser light
carried out by US physicist Lene Hau and her colleagues and reported in
Nature at the beginning of this year [1]. They show how you can stop
light in its tracks. A 2km long laser light-beam, the dragon, can be trapped
inside a layer of sodium atoms as thin as a veil, by means of coherent
entanglement. The sodium atoms, cooled to near absolute zero and prepared in a
coherent state by a coupling laser, slows down the incident laser beam ten
million-fold, so that the head hardly has time to emerge before the tail end is
completely absorbed. Switching off the coupling laser at this point effectively
traps the beam – now squeezed to ten-millionth of its original length -
inside the layer. The beam can remain imprisoned for close to a thousandth of a
second, which is an eternity on the scale of the speed of light. Switching on
the coupling laser will immediately release the light beam to continue on its
way. Not only that, by switching the coupling laser on and off three times in
succession, the light beam can be released in three separate segments.
This amazing capture of energy by coherent entanglement is what
organisms do for a living, day in and day out. Think of coherent entanglement
in terms of partners dancing together, perfectly in step, but each doing
different movements.
As we face the threats of genetic engineering in the midst of the
climate change catastrophe, poet Wendell Berry reminds us, "Thine life is a
miracle, think again" [2]. Think again, for it is imperative to replace the
destructive, mechanistic and instrumental view of life with the truly organic
and miraculous.
James Hillman and Satish Kumar talked about the soul this morning. The
soul is the essence of the whole. Organisms are possessed of the irrepressible
tendency towards being whole, towards being part of a larger whole. They are
predisposed to be soulful. Whole books could be written on the miracle of
organisms, and I have written one of them [3], but I won’t have time to
talk about that. Instead, I’ll show you some suggestive images of the
organism.
It has become a truism that living organisms depend on energy flow.
Actually, energy flow is not sufficient; it is energy capture and storage that
is key. The sun shines on earth as it does on Mars and Venus, but only earth
has life, as far as we know, because only earth has successfully captured and
stored the energy of sunlight. The real miracle that enables life to emerge
then is to close the energy circle, to make a life cycle that stores and feeds
on the energy flowing through. Something magical happens with a circle. A
circle entails perpetual return, and that means dynamic stability.
The life cycle is in turn made up of numerous sub-cycles of activities,
or biological rhythms, ranging in periods of split seconds and minutes, to
circadian, annual and supra-annual (see Figure 1). James Hillman has urged us
all to slow down, but also warns against excessive slowing which leads to
stagnation. Well, the organism has the full range of activities from the very
slow to the very fast all at once, and from the most local to the global. (Just
as Schumacher says, we have to pay attention to both the very small as well as
the very big, the local and the global.) Each sub-cycle in the diagram is a
domain of stored coherent energy. Coherent energy comes and goes
together so it can do work, as opposed to incoherent energy that goes in all
directions and cancels itself out. You must imagine further, that each
sub-domain has an internal structure similar to Figure 1. This
‘self-similarity’ of fractal structures is characteristic of natural
processes. All the cycles of activities are linked coherently together;
they are dancing together in step but each doing different things at
different paces. That is why I can be digesting my breakfast while talking to
you and waving my arms about as well.
As you can see, the more sub-cycles there are, the more energy is stored
within the system. Cycles make perfect thermodynamic sense. Not only do they
give dynamic stability, they enable the activities to be perfectly
co-ordinated.
Figure 1. The life-cycle of the organism consists of
innumerable, nested and coupled sub-cycles within.
Most importantly, the cycles are linked through all space-time scales in
a symmetrical, or reciprocal way, so that processes yielding energy can
directly or indirectly transfer the energy to those that require energy, and
their roles can be reversed as the need arises. By the same token, energy can
be readily transferred from all over the system to any local point and
conversely, energy created at any local point can spread over the entire
system, with the minimum loss or dissipation. In other words, energy transfer
is rapid, efficient and reversible. This creates the conditions for internal
balance, so that coherent energy is maximally conserved, and the system
organisation is maintained.
All I have said up to now describes the ideal healthy organism, and
applies also to a healthy ecosystem, or any sustainable system [4]. Figure 1
explains why sustainable systems are biodiverse, for they maximise energy
storage over all space-time scales.
The reciprocal relationships between the activities occurring over the
system are the key to dynamic balance and sustainability. You may ask how one
can speak of reciprocity when it is always the wolf that devours the lamb. The
wolf feeding on the lamb is storing lamb energy, so when the wolf dies and
decomposes, it goes to nourish the grass that feeds the sheep that suckles the
lamb. One has to think of reciprocities extending over space-times.
Figure 2. The organism consists of cyclic
non-dissipative processes coupled to the dissipative one-way energy
flow.
Now, let me show you some images of real organisms (see them
here). These are live organisms (the fruitfly larva,
daphnia and the brine shrimp) recorded on video camera with an imaging
technique invented in my laboratory, which enables us to see them in all the
colours of the rainbow. The technique is a slight modification of the polarised
light microscopy routinely used by earth scientists to look at rock crystals
and more recently, also liquid crystals. But crystals have static molecular
order, so how can living, moving organisms appear crystalline? All the
molecules in the body would be moving around transforming and transferring
energy.
The answer is that the molecules must be moving coherently together.
Because the coherent motions are much slower than the vibrations of light, the
molecules appear static to the light passing through. It is like capturing a
still photograph of a moving object with a very fast film. In fact, these
images directly demonstrate that highly coherent molecular motions must be
taking place in the organisms’ body. The organism is thick with coherent
activities over all scales, from the molecular to the macroscopic. There is no
preferred level within the organism. All the parts are participating in
the whole.
These images also show that how we observe determines what we observe.
As someone said, if your only tool is a hammer, then everything looks like a
nail. Mechanistic biology is like a hammer, so everything looks dead as nails,
or as Brian Goodwin said, like nuts and bolts. If we observe with the
sensitivity of organisms, however, we see them as organisms. Our imaging
technique is non-destructive, if not non-invasive. You can put the organisms
back into the aquarium afterwards.
I would like to draw out some of the main lessons the organism teaches
us about the organic whole as opposed to the mechanistic whole. The organic
whole is an ideal democracy of distributed control. It does not work in terms
of a hierarchy of controller versus the controlled, but by intercommunication.
Ultimately, each is as much in control as it is sensitive and responsive. In
the ideal coherent system, local freedom (or autonomy) and global cohesion are
both maximised. That is impossible within a mechanical system where
public and private, local and global, are always in conflict.
Most important of all, the organic whole is quintessentially diverse and
pluralistic. The organism is the antithesis of uniformity and homogeneity. We
have some 30 000 genes and 300 000 proteins, astronomical numbers of
metabolites, cofactors, inorganic ions, in numerous kinds of cells, tissues and
organs that make up our body, all of which are necessary for sustaining the
whole. In the same way, populations are naturally diverse, and thriving
ecosystems are rich in species.
As hundreds of indigenous tribes today are being driven to extinction by
the activities of corporations engaged in mining, timbering and oil extraction,
I must stress in the strongest terms that we need the diversity of cultures in
the human species. We need the full diversity of cultures to sustain the human
miracle, to express the full creative human potential.
- Liu C, Dutton Z, Behroozi CH and Hau LV. Observation of coherent
optical information storage in an atomic medium using halted light pulses.
Nature 2001, 409, 490-3. Apologies to Cornell EA. Stopping light in its
tracks. Nature 2000, 409, 2001, for taking liberties with his account
based on train-spotting.
- See Life is a Miracle by Wendell Berry, 2000.
- The Rainbow and The Worm, The Physics of Organisms by Mae-Wan
Ho, World Scientific, Singapore, 1993, 2nd ed., 1998.
- On the nature of sustainable economic systems. Mae-Wan Ho World
Futures 51, 199-221, 1998; also final chapter of Genetic Engineering
Dream or Nightmare? Turning the Tide on the Brave New World of Bad Science and
Big Business, by Mae-Wan Ho, Gateway, Gill & Macmillan, Dublin,
1999.
| |
|
