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Some Reflections on and : Negentropy and Eurhythmy

Article in Quantum Matter · June 2015 DOI: 10.1166/qm.2015.1282

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The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Some reflections on life and physics: negentropy and eurhythmy

Gildo Magalhães1, University of São Paulo

Abstract

Until now there has been an unresolved controversy as to the possibility of reduction of life to what would be more fundamental blocks of nature such as the building units of modern physics and chemistry. Only recently have we begun developing a more complete realist, causal theory of quantum physics – the eurhythmy-based hyperphysis - that concurs to supersede the paradoxical formulation modeled by Bohr’s school of non- causal, probabilistic worldview of the Universe. As we gain a deeper insight into this new theory, it becomes apparent that in the history of science a related question concerning life and non-life has been a misplaced one – instead of trying to follow the trail from the living to the non-living, as in well-known mechanistic and reductionist approaches, life itself in its fundamental functioning can be considered as a profound and coherent extension of what is usually called the “inert” realm. The non-living systems already possess a certain degree of organization, which predisposes nature for further, increasing complexification, until conditions for life emergence appear. This means that we should start thinking the other way round, i.e. to seek the properties of life that can be recognizable also in the quantum and subquantum world. Misconceptions about are largely responsible for the resulting gap between life and “inert” matter, and it is therefore necessary to review this issue from a different perspective.

Introductory Remarks

Gottfried W. Leibniz (1646-1716) in his discussion with Samuel Clarke (who wrote on behalf of Isaac Newton) expressed that this Universe where we live in is optimized, and therefore it does not stop as a mechanical clock does, it does not necessitate a “clockmaker” to rewind it, as time passes by 2. A built-in, “pre-established” harmony exists both internally and externally to any subsystem in the Universe, manifesting itself as a long-term trend towards greater harmony, even though for a small domain of time-space there may intrude here and there some disharmony, which disappears as the larger picture is focused3.

1 Associated Professor, History of Science, University of São Paulo. E-mail: [email protected] 2 G.W. Leibniz, “Correspondência com Clarke”, Os Pensadores, v. XIX. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1974, pp. 403-468. The above expression “as time passes by” can eventually be omitted, as we will subsequently deal with some problems inherent to the concept of time in relation to entropy. 3 This idea was recovered and reshaped as the principle of eurhythmy, assumed in the new hyperphysis developed by José Croca and the Lisbon group (cf. J.R. Croca and J.E.F. Araújo, A new vision on physis – eurhythmy, emergence and nonlinearity. Lisboa: CFCUL/FCT, 2010).

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This principle is universal, and must hence hold true also for the subquantum level, and in fact for any system or, considering its inner structuring, for any subsystem thereof. Now, there is no stand-alone system in the Universe, any two individual parts of it will already make up a system, so that all of its subsystems interact with each other, and moreover any subsystem provided with an inner structure interacts internally with itself. The structuring of a subsystem, or in other words, the elements of what may form its “complexity”, are a source of matter/energy/information, which provides for its interaction with other subsystems or with itself. For all we can know until now, it is not possible to designate an ultimate “atomic” level, below which everything is merely residual noise, i.e. a set of unorganized states; at least there is no hint that such a level has been, or will ever be reached. Of course subsystems may disorganize themselves, and thus may not contribute towards the eurhythymic development of the immediately associated collectivity. For instance, an acron (the hyperphysis concept to designate any ontological being emerging from theta waves in the subquantum level, such as electrons and photons) may disappear subsumed by apparent noise, or in examples of other organizations levels a living cell can die, or a white dwarf star disintegrate, and yet overall these cases are compensated by more and more structuring, which may even use the remnants of the disorganization, and proceed on to more organization. The Universe does not run down, - and consequently, it is continually upgrading its organization quality, or complexity – that is what is meant with the concept of eurhythmy at large, not only restricted to acrons and waves, but to all subsystems of the Universe.

Entropy as a symptom

The idea of energy creation out of “nothing” has a long tradition and it is deemed impossible to realize, out of philosophical and empirical reasons4. Expressed in its most common scientific statement this prohibition became known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics – if a hot body is placed in contact with a colder one in a closed system, with time there will result temperature equalization, not a growing temperature difference. As originally formulated in 1850 by Rudolph Clausius (1822-88), this was a purely empirical conclusion, without any specific reasons for its acceptance beyond what is considered to be common sense.

Shortly afterwards, this statement gained a formal aspect, when the corresponding concept of entropy was introduced by him, as follows. Let dQ be an elementary quantity of heat which a system may absorb from a higher–temperature reservoir, and T the absolute temperature of the body at the moment of giving up this heat to another reservoir at a lower

4 Ord-Hume, Arthur W.J.G. Perpetual motion – the history of an obsession. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977.

2 temperature; then, according to Clausius, the following inequality must hold good for every possible cyclical process, where dS is called elementary entropy of the system5:

dS = dQ/T ≥ 0

In a later paper (1865), Clausius reformulated the Second Law of Thermodynamics using this concept of entropy, concluding that the entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.

Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) applied the same concept in 1877 to a gas in a box, and through a statistical reasoning he arrived at a new definition of entropy,

S= k lnW, where k was later named Boltzmann's constant (1.3806503 × 10-23 m2 kg s-2 ºK-1) and W is the number of possible gas microstates consistent with the given macro-state of the gas.

In 1948, Claude Shannon (1916-2001) studied also using a statistical approach, and developed a similar expression for the measure of the uncertainty in a random variable, where pi (xi) is the probability mass function of an outcome xi (i = 1,…, n) for that variable, and this was called information entropy:

n H = ∑ pi log2 pi (xi)

But what is the concept of information involved in this discussion? It is always implicit in the various different definitions of information that there is an observer out there, and that the quantities measured are relative to the observer’s apprehension. Entropy as a quantity of information measurement supposes then that we are dealing with a phenomenon that is going to be measured at the source and at the receiver by someone (the observer) who has the capacity to discern what is to be measured – and similar to the observer in orthodox quantum physics, he is supposed to be capable of creating some type of reality of the process out of his observation. This type of information can be the machine-like one that computers can manipulate, but is it real knowledge? We suspect it is not, since real knowledge is something new, and its production cannot be a priori quantified, so that the probability to be ascertained is necessarily relational, and only possible a posteriori.

5 For ideal reversible cycles the equality holds; for non-ideal ones, it is considered that dS is the sum of two parts, dSe (describing the flow between the environment and the system, which may be reversible) and dSi (which describes the internal transformations of the system, considered irreversible and associated to the flow of time) – cf. Ilya Prigogine & Isabelle Stengers, A nova aliança (orig. title La nouvelle alliance). Brasília: UnB, 1991, p. 95.

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Anyway, it is relevant that this conception of information led to a reevaluation of entropy in 1962 by Léon Brillouin (1889-1969); accordingly, entropy does not measure exactly the amount of disorder in a physical system, it rather measures the lack of information about the actual structure of the system.

After this very brief review of issues related to our initial presentation of the entropy concept, we would like to pose a simple, yet fundamental question: is the Second Law of Thermodynamics a natural law, a physical law? Or is it a hypothesis, perhaps even a postulate, so that one can investigate its origin and rightfully ask for the reasons why does an isolated system should evolve towards equilibrium? There is no real explanation why entropy cannot decrease; all attempts have been to explain why this is never observed, which is a different issue – since non-observation does not imply non-existence, especially because observations and data are usually impregnated by idiosyncratic (sometimes even positivist) assumptions, and one generally observes what one already expects to find 6. We will return to this matter ahead, but we can already advance our standpoint: the thermodynamic prohibition is more a hypothetical principle than a law.

The reduction of entropy and time irreversibility

One of the big stumbling blocks for early acceptance of the concept of entropy by the scientific community in the second half of the 19th Century was the well known property of equations in physics to be time reversible, which led to subsequent questioning about the appropriateness of a priori conceptions of time (like the Newtonian or the Kantian ideas of time). A biological notion of time using the well-known adaptationist approach would say that surviving species like our own have developed a time framework to which we are adapted because it is well related to what happens in the environment. That notwithstanding, it is also known that different human cultures have varying concepts of time, and consequently the nature of physical time as a univocal property of the world could be, at least to a certain degree, ethnologically doubtful 7.

Of course, the usual deployment of the real number line continuum in a linear development as a framework for coordinating time’s physical representations by the human cognitive agent has been quite successful for our own society. However, it must be pointed out that any point in the real line is itself extremely organized, in the sense that it is not a direct sensory entity, but must be comprehended as the outcome of a process, and any

6 A series of cases already studied in the history of science testifies to that, as reviewed by Allan Franklin (The neglect of experiment. Cambridge: University Press, 1989); cf. also Holton, Gerald, The scientific imagination: case studies. Cambridge: University Press, 1978. 7 Paul Ricoeur et al. As culturas e o tempo (orig. title Les cultures et le temps). Petrópolis/São Paulo: Vozes. EDUSP, 1975. For example, in the Indian Vedic tradition time is a non-existing abstraction, what exists is the time flow of beings; on the other hand, for some of the ancient Greeks the heavenly regular movement is the pattern of time measurement (and the very time itself), and a proof of the good cosmic order.

4 region around the point is an infinitely dense set; in fact, any real number as well as the continuum of real numbers is (possibly, pending on the so-called continuum hypothesis) of the “aleph-1” type, to use Georg Cantor’s (1845-1918) terminology, so that in the timeline metaphor any instant of time would share this property of a process construction. Consequently, there seems to be a paradox if we interpret entropy as a measure of disorganization related to time passing by – time would not be appropriately characterized as a quantity indicating entropy, because any point in the real line is, on the contrary, a maximum of organization, and so is also necessarily any aggregate of instants.

It is, however, true that maintaining a realist causal view of the Universe, this property called “time” as sensed by humans is facilitated by an association with “before” and “after” in a scale, of which the real number line can be a useful approximation metaphor, which results in posing the physical existence of a “time arrow”. Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953) went as far as admitting that we cannot acquire knowledge about a system which has at the present a direction of time contrary to our own convention of this time ordering8. Adolf Grünbaum (1923-), on the other hand, refused that causal relationships may be used to ascertain the direction of the time arrow; for him the time anisotropy, contrary to physics equations’ time isotropy, might be for us more basic than the causal relationships, which are themselves to be derived from that anisotropy.

In 1872 Boltzmann presented his “H-theorem”, whereby he tried to provide a mechanical explanation of why gas molecules in a box would always increase their entropy. Immediately afterwards Johann Josef Loschmidt (1821-1895) objected that this was not logically necessary, which led Boltzmann in 1877 to give up his original intention, and to recognize the possibility that entropy could indeed decrease. The ensuing historical discussion of the theme by scientists like James Maxwell (1831- 1879), William Thomson (1824-1907) and Peter Tait (1831-1901) evolved to the point where several contemporary physicists admitted the possibility of a local entropy decrease, at the same time pointing out that this event was “extremely unlikely”. In conclusion, some of those physicists were willing to admit that the Second Law has only a statistical validity, and in consequence an entropy increase is generally what we can observe.

However, in 1896, Ernst Zermelo (1871-1953) wrote against the probabilistic notion of entropy, saying that this was just a mathematical idealization, and therefore the statistical viewpoint could not be considered a basis for denying an overall entropy decrease – he maintained that thermodynamics cannot be a probability theory but should be a “real” physical theory. Boltzmann’s answer to Zermelo was the introduction of his “cosmological hypothesis”, meaning that the Universe, which started in a very unlikely state, still is in an

8 Hans Reichenbach, The philosophy of space and time. New York: Dover, 1957, p. 270. In this section, we draw extensively from Alfredo Pereira Jr.’s Irreversibilidade física temporal na tradição Boltzmanniana (Temporal physical irreversibility in the Boltzmann tradition). São Paulo: Edunesp, 1997.

5 unlikely state - or at least the part of the Universe where the Earth is located is in an unlikely state. Further analysis of Boltzmann’s position has considered his cosmological hypothesis to be an ad hoc assumption, as well as many subsequent attempts to derive a non-probabilistic answer to the question of non-increase of entropy.

Life and negentropy

In his quite famous book of 1944, What is life?, Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) wrote that there is an obvious inability of physics and chemistry to account for the emergence and maintenance of life. He used the term “negative entropy” to oppose the assumed degradation property characterized by entropy, and thus to highlight the capacity to produce order out of disorder, considered a distinctive property between living matter as compared to inert matter. In his own words, “What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy”9.

Schrödinger then reasoned that, as living systems are open to the environment, they can decrease local entropy at the expense of the environment, so that the sum total of entropy still increases. Exactly because human beings are a product of entropy decrease (as Schrödinger reluctantly admitted), it is once again paradoxical for us to define time’s arrow as the increase of entropy – with the passage of time the organization and complexity of life increased, so it remained for Schrödinger, in the manner of Boltzmann, to postulate that we are in a special, low-entropy region of the Universe, which itself at large deviates from this “anomaly”.

In a collective to celebrate fifty years of the publication of that book by Schrödinger10, the perplexity in face of said anomaly of negative entropy lingers on in most of the respective essays. The advances in genetics, especially in genomics, barely disguise the uneasiness which confronts natural scientists, when it comes to understand the general trend towards complexity which characterizes the emergence of life. It is therefore not surprising that almost all such essays falter exactly where Schrödinger did: the difference in closed and open systems, which is crucial to reassessing the role of entropy in thermodynamics11.

What is necessary to circumvent the entropic limitation would be to postulate that in the description of the Universe to which our species is used to, and where the convention of

9 Erwin Schrödinger, What is life? Cambridge: University Press, 1969 (reprint), p. 76. 10 Michael Murphy & Luke O’Neill (org.), What is life? The next fifty years. Speculations on the future of biology. Cambridge: University Press, 1995. 11 The perplexity within biology should persist as long as one does not dare to escape the in-built reductionism of Darwinian evolution, since evolution is also vital for understanding the phenomenon of life, and Darwinian models rely only on chance mutations, instead of admitting some type of self-propelled evolutionism. The exceptions in that book go to those authors who, like Stuart Kauffman, assume that living systems are open systems capable of self-organization.

6 time is useful within the limits of our experience, the “arrow” of time is not equivalent to an increase in entropy. In other words, for time to be irreversible one does not require an entropy increase. Even in what is considered a closed system (or quasi-closed system, to include the observer in it), it may be possible that entropy decreases in a quantity which is enough for realizing work, and reversibility of a phenomenon may exist even far away from the equilibrium conditions. If that is assumed, instead of S = dQ/T ≥ 0, we would then have everywhere the possibility of entropy decrease, S = dQ/T ≤ 0. It remains to decide whether these regions of entropic decrease are in general possible in the Universe as a whole, while an increase in entropy is the unusual, quite the contrary of the assumption behind the scientific paradigm since Boltzmann and others12. The justification for such a contrary hypothesis is better illuminated in the biological realm, but as it shall be dealt with later, it is not exclusive to this, since in general all of our Universe can be rationally understood in the same light. No experiment can detect whether the Universe as such is indeed an open or closed system, therefore in principle it is not illogical to hypothesize the existence in it of open system with sources of overall surplus energy.

Biological evolution as opposed to statistical fluctuations

As stated earlier, we intend to approach physics and chemistry from the viewpoint of the life sciences, and for this reason it is essential to review some major controversies in this field that appeared most strongly in the first half of the 20th century, when the current scientific paradigms in natural sciences were either forged or reinforced. To do this, we start by citing Henri Bergson (1859-1941), who in his major work Creative evolution (1907) already criticized the reach of mechanist, reductionist explanations, because these could be valid only inasmuch as our thought artificially isolated them from the whole. For him, life entails ever-growing complexity, and basically life started when the universe itself was created13.

Bergson’s worldview developed at a time when the experiments of embryologist Hans Driesch (1867-1941) had already provided a firmer basis to oppose vitalism to current reductionist explanations14. This is not merely of circumstantial interest, since reductionism

12 The rationale for this entropic assumption lies in the already-mentioned statement of Clarke/Newton that the universal machinery constantly loses its wound-up energy and needs the intervention of the “master clock manufacturer”. A strong support for this idea was Malthus’s “paradox” of limited resources against growing population – all of these issues are related to the advocacy of entropy growth, with consequences in the real economy and politics. 13 Henri Bergson, A evolução criadora (orig. title L’évolution créatrice). Rio de Janeiro: Opera Mundi, 1973, p. 255. And, of course, if the Universe does not have an origin, neither does life. 14 Hans Driesch, The science and philosophy of the organism. London; Adam and Charles Black, 1908; id., The history and theory of vitalism. London: Macmillan and Co., 1912. Driesch’s concept of “entelechy” to deal with life’s emergence is remindful of Leibniz’ “monad” terminology. His practical findings would much later resurface as contemporary scientists began to experiment with cloning and stem cells.

7 is philosophically a doctrine that intends ultimately to understand the living as essentially in terms of a non-living basis; even though the borderline is not so well defined, there are clear distinctions in terms of the intensity of their respective complexification, exactly what is denied by reductionism. Driesch experimented around 1892 with amputated sea urchin embryos and other animals, and he demonstrated that a halved embryo resulted in a complete, albeit smaller animal: the fate of any one cell in the organism is not deterministically fixed, but is a function of its place amidst other cells – the collective (whole) communicates with the individual in a nonlinear way, and as a consequence the organism is larger than the sum of its individual parts.

Konstantin Mereshkovsky (1855-1921) brought forth the concept of symbiogenesis between 1905 and 1909, a complement to the creative evolution envisaged by both Bergson and Driesch. In his conception, the vital combination of mutually supporting different organisms of higher and lower complexity sped up evolution through symbiosis, as for example when descendants of cyanobacteria modified to form chloroplasts, and photosynthesis emerged as a vital step to enable the appearance of the plant kingdom15.

In 1935 Ervin Bauer (1890-1938), another biologist influenced by Driesch, wrote a very original work, Theoretical biology, a singular treatise where he enunciated two principles for life:

 Principle of stable non-equilibrium – no living system is in equilibrium; on the contrary, it survives working against physical and chemical equilibrium. At all levels of a living system this non-equilibrium is manifest, starting in the molecular level. Equilibrium as such is attained only at the death of the system. The maximum molecular disequilibrium corresponds to the most excited electronic state; the transition to a less excited state is followed by the emission of a photon16.  Principle of historical trend towards external work increase – living systems exhibit a structured and oriented process, increasing the system’s free energy stock, i.e. its stable non-equilibrium. As the stock energy available for a living system tends to decrease, it must gain a higher stock by performing more external work than demanded by just its sustainability (internal work), so that it can keep its stable non-equilibrium 17. Bauer emphasizes that this is a trend, not a fixed deterministic outcome, and naturally deviations occur, but the overall effect is the creation of a structured and directional process, i.e. self organization.

15 See Francisco Carrapiço, “The symbiotic phenomenon in the evolutive context”, in O. Pombo et al. (eds.), Special sciences and the unity of science. Doordrecht: Springer, 2012 16 E.S. Bauer, Theoretical biology. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982 (reprint of the Russian 1935 edition, with an abridged English translation), pp. 235-239. Bauer was arrested and executed in one of Stalin’s purges. See Miklós Müller, “A martyr of science, Ervin Bauer”, Hungarian Quarterly, 46 (178), pp. 123-131 (2005). 17 Bauer, op. cit., pp. 239-241.

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To situate Bauer’s contribution within the context of contemporary Russian soviet science, we should recall the researches of still another scientist influenced by Hans Driesch, Alexander Gurvich (1874-1954), who proposed a theory of “vector biological fields” 18. Gurvich had studied eggs of amphibians and equinoderms in the first decade of the 20th century, when he discovered that centrifugation destroyed all visible structures of the egg, but the formation of blastulae continued after the mechanical action ended. Their intracellular structure was maintained by , and he concluded that there must be an unstable molecular association kept through a continuous energy inflow to the cell.

Gurvich decided to test his theory and through a series of experiments he discovered that all animals and plants emitted a radiation in cases of metabolic degradation (as sudden cooling or light narcosis), or physical stress (such as centrifugation or a weak alternating current). He noticed at the same time that all living systems continuously emit high-energy photons in the ultraviolet band, and in 1923, while performing his landmark “onion experiment”, he evidenced that growth in the apical region of the onion through cell mitosis was followed by a weak radiation, calling this the “mitogenetic radiation”. This radiation of very weak intensity, in the presence of external factors (other radiation, heating or cooling, mechanical stress, chemicals, etc.) was very much amplified (a phenomenon we could describe today as a kind of “laser action”). During the embryo formation the spontaneous radiation decreases, while the mitogenetic radiation increases several times in magnitude.

Due to these experimental results, Gurvich advanced the hypothesis that the complex of cells forming an embryo may be idealized as a certain geometrical space19. Every living cell produces an elementary vector field in this space, whose primary source is the chromatin (in the cell nucleus), projecting beyond the structural boundary of the cell (its outer membrane). During the morphogenic process, moving cells are oriented as if attracted by a “surface of force”, and the field divides as soon as the cell itself divides. A characteristic feature of this cell field is its anisotropy; the total field is the sum of the cell’s self- field and all other cells’ contributions. Even if there is no chemical interaction between two cell populations, and provided there is some physical coupling between them (for instance, an optical interaction), the excitation in a cell is followed by physiological changes in another one. This biological field may reveal itself as exhibiting

18 See Alexander Gurvich and Lydia Gurvich, “Twenty years of mitogenetic radiation: emergence, development and perspectives”, 21st Century Science & Technology, vol. 12, nº 3, Fall 1999, pp. 41-53. Alexander Gurvich was a colleague of Bauer in Leningrad during 1934-37. In 1948, A. Gurvich resigned his academic positions, as a protest against the administrative methods employed by Stalin’s minister Lysenko. 19 Gurvich presented several basic postulates for his theory of the vector biological field. See a review of these by Michael Lipkind, “Alexander Gurvich and the concept of the biological field”. 21st Century Science and Technology. Part 1, vol. 11, nº 2, Summer 1998, pp. 36-51; id., Part 2, vol. 11, nº 3, Fall 1998, pp. 34-53.

9 electromagnetic, acoustic, thermal, chemical, or a mechanical nature. According to Gurvich, the interacting cellular fields form a nonlinear “synthetic field”, which is more than the mere superposition of the individual cellular fields. The general behavior of a cell is defined by the dynamic interaction between the synthetic field and its own cellular self- field. Cells that isolate themselves from the synthetic field, selfishly ignoring the needs of the whole, may generally turn malignant (cancerous) and perish afterwards.

The fundamental difference between life and non-life according to this view is not some “essence”, but the relatively more complex organization of the respective matter and energy flows and storage. Among the manifestations of life’s complexity are metabolism, reactivity, reproduction, growth, and development20. Generally in response to external stimuli the living systems release energy (“free energy”) in quantities far exceeding the energy of the stimulus. According to the well-known Soviet scientist Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945), both the organic and the inorganic nature exhibit a process of development that starts from incoherent uniformity and is refined into differentiated structures21. This is the universal behavior of nature, of which the “natural laws” we know are but particular cases.

For Vernadsky, it is the biosphere itself (the volume surrounding the Earth where life thrives, ranging from geological rock layers to the upper stratosphere) which undergoes continuous evolution, not just the species. Creative (“scientific”) human thought should be considered itself as a new geological force in the biosphere, qualitatively different from the preceding physical-chemical and biological evolution; the achievements of human knowledge, especially noteworthy in science, lend the distinctive character of a “noosphere” (a noetic envelope of Earth) to the Universe. The biosphere’s internal organization commands evolution, as while life contributes to geological transformations so that the number and the spectrum of chemical reactions engendered by living matter are always increasing. Man’s emergence and his freedom to intervene in the biosphere reflect a primordial tendency in the living systems. Many eras were necessary to attain the power necessary for man to reflect upon his emergence as a species, and this was made possible only through the advent of the noosphere.

It was also noted that biological reactions are characterized by nonlinear oscillatory processes. During metabolism of organisms, there are processes of electron transfer that are highly sensitive to weak resonance interactions. According to Russian biophysicist

20 Vladimir Voeikov, “The scientific basis of the new biological paradigm”. 21st Century Science and Technology, vol. 12, nº 2, Summer 1999, pp. 18-33. 21 Vladimir Vernadsky, Scientific thought as a planetary phenomenon. Moscow: Vernadsky Foundation, 1997; id., The Biosphere. New York: Copernicus, 1997. Vernadsky was a pioneer of biogeochemistry; he had previously migrated to France but returned to the USSR in 1926, and remained there supporting the political ideals of the Soviet revolution.

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Vladimir Voeikov (1946 - ), collagens and many plasma proteins have helical structures that could act as antennae for electromagnetic wave transfer at long distances22.

A return to biophotons

Along the contemporary historical research of science, there is a growing feeling that since the 19th century we have been undergoing a change of paradigm in the biological sciences, even though this perception is still far away from the mainstream recognition, which tends to neglect the challenges to the prevailing paradigm of reductionism. This is also partly due to the fact that the alternative new paradigm also favors a return to some kind of Lamarckian evolutionism, a hard bit to swallow inside the present status of ideologically biased Darwinism, which dominates science and precludes any historically evolved direction from the “inside” of organisms. This is the main reason for ignoring the achievements of scientists such as Driesch, Bauer, Gurvich, and Vernadsky (other than the Cold War barrier that prevented the scientific information exchange between the world powers in opposite fields during the years of the mid until late 20th Century).

The German biophysicist Fritz Popp (1938 - ), however, has returned to Gurvich’s line of research since the 1970’s, and confirmed that all organisms emit light (biophotons) of ultra weak intensity throughout the optical range, markedly deviating from the Boltzmann distribution of a system at thermodynamic equilibrium. Photons are held in a coherent form in the organism, and when stimulated, they are emitted also coherently, like a very weak, multimode laser. His collaborator Mae Wan Ho has written extensively about these results, and even though she does not always acknowledge the ancestry of ideas that we have exposed here, it is worthwhile to recapitulate her conclusions to compare with the vantage point of the overall historical scientific developments we are dealing with.

Mae-Wan Ho has reflected that the evidence of biophotons’ production demands a reinterpretation of entropy23. She emphasizes that life is a process of becoming - and continuing to be - an organizing whole. One cannot explain life by laws that apply relatively well to steam engines or unorganized collections of molecules. Biological cellular membranes on the other hand are excitable structures capable of amplifying signals into the cell, as for example in the transport of ions Na+ out of the cell, and K+ into the cell. Weak electrical fields or even randomly fluctuating electric fields can drive this active transport, and the weak signals will be received by the system only when they are all collectively phased in tune.

22 Voeikov, op. cit., p. 27. 23 Mae-Wan Ho, “What is (Schrödinger’s) Negentropy?” in Modern Trends in BioThermoKinetics 3: 50–61, 1994; id. The rainbow and the worm – the physics of organisms, 2nd edition. Singapore: World Scientific, 1998.

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An organism is a structured heterogeneity, a dynamic organization where processes occur within a range of characteristic time and spatial intervals. According to Ho, these processes, rather than constituting the innate “memory” of the system, are projections into the future at every stage, i.e. they determine how the system will develop and respond in times to come. In other words, it is as if there really existed a directional arrow, and the constituents of the system, when organized, could point in that direction ahead of their time of occurrence. This is a statement of teleology which the majority of biologists will emphatically discredit as fictitious, since they advocate the banning of the word “progress”, which according to them ought to be definitely excluded from the current vocabulary of biology24.

The energy in a system can be divided into stored energy and . Thermal reach equilibrium by temperature θ in a characteristic relaxation time interval t, while stored energies remain in non-equilibrium distribution for a time longer than t. Accordingly “Maxwell’s demon” is inherently built up in the structure of the system in which energy is stored, so that no additional information is necessary to be input25. Therefore, says Ho, entropy is not a property of a system, its absolute magnitude cannot be directly determined, it is just a dispositional property, to be observed only when certain operations are carried on. The second law of thermodynamics can thus be restated by her as per the following definition: “Useful work can be done by molecules by a direct transfer of stored energy, and thermalized energy cannot be converted into stored energy”.

By direct transfer Ho means a reversible process, with no generation of entropy (dS=0), and so quickly that it is only limited by the speed of light (of course, if we accept this is a maximum velocity). She gives the following example: resonant energy transfer between molecules has typical time duration of 10-14 s, whereas the molecular vibrations die down (thermalize) in t =10-9 s. Resonant molecules can attract each other, and similar processes are involved in all major biological transduction processes: coupled electron transport, ATP synthesis, photosynthesis. For instance, chlorophyll molecules in the light- harvesting molecular “antennae” transfer the energy of the absorbed photons also through some form of resonant energy.

It is not the quantity of energy in biomass that is responsible for the success of living organisms, but the quality of such energy, how it is structured in the living system, and how it is stored and mobilized in naturally coupled flows26. Energy is trapped in living

24 Stephen Jay Gould, “On replacing the idea of progress with an operational notion of directionality”, in D. Hull and M. Ruse (eds.), The philosophy of biology. Oxford: University Press, 1998, pp. 650-658 . 25 In fact, for Maxwell it is merely our knowledge of the world that is statistical, not the world itself. 26 The idea of coupled energy flows was already present in the work of biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864- 1944), in the individual organism as well as in its relationship to the environment (cf. A foray into the worlds of animals and humans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Mary Wan Ho (The raimbow and the worm) gives an intriguing example of embryos that have survived without energy flow.

12 forms directly at the electronic level, stored as vibration and electronic bond energies, and everywhere in the overall upgrading structure of the living system: in gradients, fields and flow patterns, compartments, organelles, cells and tissues. Organisms mobilize their energies coherently and make them available as necessary27. Very importantly, the steady state, at which global balance is maintained, must harbor nonlinear processes, violating microscopic reversibility.

Ho stresses that purely mechanical systems work like a hierarchy of controllers and controlled subsystems, in the same way as when bosses make decisions and their workers work, that is, they are undemocratic and non-participatory. Organic systems, by contrast, work in intercommunication and with total participation, so that everyone is simultaneously boss and worker. Inside a cell, synchronization of its multiple internal oscillators is the rule, facilitated by the existence of amplifying mechanisms. This is possible because organisms are responsive to weak electric and magnetic fields.

Symmetrically coupled cycles (which are the basis of living organizations) do spontaneously arise in open systems which are capable of storage under energy flows. Symmetrical coupling may also be important for dynamical stability in the far-from- equilibrium regime, which would explain the emergence of order also in dissipative structures (like in Bénard convection cells). A dissipative coherent structure is a non- statistical, collective activity generating long–range dynamical order – we have already mentioned the cell’s “laser” action as another example of the production of a collective mode of activity28.

The living system is a superposition of non-dissipative cyclic processes and dissipative irreversible processes, with zero net entropy29. A living organism is predominantly made up of dielectric molecules, packed densely together, and where electric and visco-elastic forces constantly interact. For example, no enzyme can work unless it is “plasticized” by water. Proteins are organized with other proteins, and a high

27 Ho derives symmetrical energy coupling and cyclical flows from Onsager’s reciprocity relationship and Morowitz’ theorem (Ho, The rainbow and the worm, p. 83-84). 28 In another occasion we referred to the interesting construction of semiconductor physics by early Soviet scientists also as a collective behavior, rather than individual “particles” (cf. “On eurhythmy as a principle for growing order and complexity in the natural world”, in J. Croca and J. Araújo, A new vision on physis, op. cit., pp. 313-330). It is also interesting to note that in quantum chemistry the ontological prevalence of the molecule, i.e. a collective , as proposed by Robert Mulliken in 1937 as responsible for the electronic orbitals, was more fruitful than the opposing ontological model centered on individual atoms for explaining the stability of hydrogen molecules (Kostas Gavroglu, O passado das ciências como história. Porto: Porto Ed., 2007, pp. 246-247). 29 ΔG = ΔH – TΔS = 0, where G is , and H the enthalpy.

13 proportion of the cell water would possibly be bound to structures along the enormous amount of surfaces formed by proteins within the cell30.

Metabolic pumping results in coherent excitations prompting macroscopic order and coordination, working like an asymptotically stable global attractor 31. Coherence entails cooperation, and even in conventional enzyme kinetics the basic quantum nature of biological processes is evident. Electron tunneling is involved in the separation of charges and electron transport across the biological membranes of the chloroplasts of green plants as well as across proteins. Connective tissues may be largely responsible for the rapid intercommunication that enables the body to function as a coherent whole32.

From protozoa to vertebrates the anterior-posterior line of the body is also the major polarizing axis for all of the tissues, giving coherence and phase-order to molecules all over the body33. Biophotons can be thus stimulated in cells, and as the molecules emit light coherently the energy of the emitted photons is not lost, part of it is coupled back, and the energy decay is delayed (following a hyperbolic function). This is a type of quantum coherence with local autonomy and global correlation. A single excited atom can transfer its bound photon to neighboring atoms through resonant dipole-dipole interactions, creating a photon tunneling effect, and the circulation of photons increases the likelihood of coherent emission (as in a laser action). Macroscopically this electromagnetic interaction is also observed in organized populations of organisms, as in the formation of bee swarms, fish shoals and other collective behavior.

One observed difference between normal and cancerous cells is that the former emit less light with increasing cell density, while malignant cells increase their light emission, showing their inability to coherently reabsorb emitted energy, and also suggesting that tumor cells have a diminished capacity for intercommunication. The processes in the

30 The French embryologist Rosine Chandebois already advanced the hypothesis that the cell protoplasm plays an active genetic role, which would explain the possibility of Lamarckian approaches to evolution (see Para acabar com o darwinismo: uma nova lógica da vida. Orig. title Pour en finir avec le darwinisme: une nouvelle logique du vivant. Lisboa: Instituto Piaget, 1996). Ho (in The rainbow and the worm) also reports James Clegg’s idea that the cell is in effect an electro-dynamic continuum with properties of a solid state system, including the propagation of electric signals via hydrogen bonds. More generally, Ho agrees with Joseph Needham’s hypothesis (1935), that the cell protoplasm behaves like a liquid crystal. 31 A general reason for the presence of attractors in nature would be the existence of natural resonance phenomena. The organism’s coherent state would function like an attractor, an end state towards which the system tends to return on being disturbed. 32 Ho thinks this may account for not yet understood phenomena like the functioning of acupuncture. 33 This statement by Ho and collaborators is another rediscovery of Gurvich’s already mentioned experimental results of the 1920’s.

14 population of cancer cells are no longer correlated in the strongly harmonic, coherent manner characteristic of healthy tissues34.

To summarize this exciting approach to a new biological paradigm, we could say that the living system is a coherent photon field bound to living matter, maintained far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Negentropy is stored energy in a space-time structured system that can be mobilized. In a non-equilibrium system, such as the living organism, the stored energy is not fixed, but on account of efficient coupling it can be transferred to ever larger space-time domains, from the quantum level (starting from the photon trapped in photosynthesis) to macroscopic levels. Negentropy hence describes a harmonically and non-linearly coupled series of causes and effects, where the total summing of harmonic effects are resonantly and more intensively coupled than the original causes.

How can individual quantum molecular “machines” process life functions in collective modes extending over macroscopic distances? In the mechanistic Darwinian concept of evolution, the organism’s “freedom” paves the way for it to act against others in the competitive race for “survival of the fittest”, while a non-Darwinian look understands evolution as maximizing the benefits for all – an attitude equally subsumed by any Spinozan-type ethics, where sustaining the others helps oneself to survive, so that altruism is also at the service of self interest35.

The subquantum medium, organization and emergence

After this perusal into the biological aspects of self-organization, it is time to dedicate some final thoughts to the same problem of organization in the “inert” realm. In what follows we are by no means suggesting that the subquantum level is “alive” in the sense we normally attach to life, as if it were a kind of reversed reductionism. Our approach is rather that the “inert” world shares some properties of the “living” world, basically because both are capable of organization, and the two realms have in common the eurhythmy property. The difference lies in the respective associated organizational complexities and resources.

According to the development of a causal non-linear quantum physics under eurhythmy assumptions the master equation36, simplified in 3 dimensions can be written as:

34 Jonathan Tennenbaum, “The biophoton revolution”, 21st Century Science and Technology, vol. 11, nº 4, Winter 1998/1999, p. 40. 35 The fallacy of liberal economics and its worship of the “free market” under this light show them therefore to be anti-natural positions, since the economic world is like a multiple set of organisms, and it is no wonder that the respective anti-naturalism of the free market so often succumbs in the real world. 36 José R. Croca, “Hyperphysis – the unification of physics”, in A new vision on Physis, op. cit., p. 102.

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This master equation can be mathematically deducted through the imposition of variation conditions on the Hamilton-Jacobi principle, and by adopting a continuity law, which incorporates an additional quantum potential, and the result is a truly nonlinear equation, that reduces to the familiar Schrödinger equation (but with the enlarged concepts of generalized mass and Planck constants, as applying also to the subquantum level) 37. It can be shown that a nonlinear field such as that corresponding to a theta wave (formerly called an “empty” wave) may be able to carry a coherent structure such as an acron to regions where the field amplitude is highest.

There is no deductive reason for a wave that is a solution to this equation to conform to a flow that is maximal along its path. In analogy with the observed result that the world may be contingent, i.e. subject to chance, but it is nonetheless causal, and in general uniform – for the same causes and the same conditions, the same results occur - a petition of principle was introduced: eurhythmy, that is the trend to optimization intrinsic to nature. This introduces a motive for the world to “perform well” (in fact, better and better), essentially along the line already envisioned by Leibniz, but recognizing that it is also of the essence of the world to behave nonlinearly (basically because any ontological being interacts with the others and with itself, an interaction which feeds back into the starting point). This conjunction of eurhythmy and nonlinearity constitutes the core of a worldview that encompasses all organization of matter / energy in all observable scales, from the acron / mother theta wave to living beings, from planetary systems to galaxies, and presumably this extends even beyond the present observational limits. Using the postulate of eurhythmy we are able to justify that the solution of the master equation is adequately described as conforming to maximal flows along its path.

The mathematical treatment of nonlinearities is usually very difficult, also in hyperphysis, and simplified approximations through linearity have been proposed to help get a heuristic projection of the real nonlinear case. However much has been achieved, it is our opinion that this situation will remain indefinitely difficult as long as the assumption of continuity is not broken. Actually, continuity is hardly compatible with non-linear superposition. The main physical reason for this in hyperphysis could be the necessary further scaling down of the acron structure into even smaller constituents. In this respect it might be worthwhile to go back to simple models as those proposed by Winston Bostick in respect to electrons and photons, whose ontology is never to be taken as a singularity

37 Amaro Rica da Silva, “Elementary nonlinear mechanics of localized fields”, in A new vision on Physis, op. cit., pp. 133-174.

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(“mathematical points”), but as manifestations of more refined inner structures38. Even though this model might perhaps not correspond to real structures, it has the advantage of hypothesizing such an inner structure, and it could possibly help to devise new models of acrons, more in accordance with nature. Drawing on his experience with plasma physics, Bostick resorted to a Leibnizian viewpoint, and considered de Broglie waves carrying an inner filamentary helicoidal structure of electromagnetic origin, capable of behaving like sensory antennae. For electrons, the model was somewhat elaborated, while for photons, it was not further detailed, it was only proposed that the photon is a combination of electric and magnetic filaments rotating as the photon moves. That still crude filamentary model is however able to describe an isolated free-moving acron like an electron or photon, and some of their properties then arise out of the model, including spins and the intrinsic feature of interacting with itself - even though we know this is at the same time too simplified, since there is no such thing as an isolated acron. The treatment of their collective behavior should deepen the nonlinear characteristics of the process which acrons normally undergo39.

It is through the self interaction of the theta wave with its accompanying acron that non-conservation of the original quantities described by the master equation could break away. This would be the manifestations of the corresponding acron’s inner structure, which we could associate with new and more powerful “sources and sinks” of internal energy. This same kind of problem already appears for a singularity in classical quantum physics; for instance, whenever step functions (and consequently impulses associated to Dirac’s delta functions) intervene, we usually resource to special conditions that maintain some sort of continuity 40. These conditions in turn entail the necessity of artificially introducing mathematical simplifications, like renormalizations or approximations of nonlinearity through the composition of linear solutions. Only by renouncing to such types of resource could acrons be incorporated in the nonlinear wave master equation in a meaningful way.

To achieve this next step, it would be necessary to resort to mathematical tools that have not yet been developed; we can only suggest that possibilities appear to lie in a direction that takes account of:

1) assuming more detailed configurations of the inner structure of acrons, that could be experimentally tested; fermions and bosons, leptons and hadrons, objects of much contemporary experimental research, still

38 Bostick, “The morphology of the electron”, International Journal of Fusion Energy, vol. 3, nº 1, January 1985, pp. 9- 52. 39 The situation seems to be also somewhat similar to the three-body problem of classical mechanics, which long ago already elicited nonlinearity as a necessary part of Nature’s description. 40 It is interesting to note that the tendency to approach impulses through some kind of generalized functions, and the associated mathematical distribution theory which includes Dirac’s delta, can be intrinsically considered as an effort to maintain continuity through discontinuity.

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presuppose a mental picture of lumplike elements without an inner structure, reminiscent of Newtonian mass points as given entities, as opposed to a Leibnizian attitude (the one he displayed trying to explain planets’ properties in the solar system as derived from a primordial fluid, i.e. a more fundamental structure). 2) a mathematical tool to operate on nonlinearity as a fundamental property; intuitively the foundations of transfinite number theory have been proposed as tentatively meaningful for this purpose; however, mathematicians do not seem to have gone much further than Cantor and Gödel in terms of transforming transfinite mathematics into an useful operational tool 41.

The structural constitution of acrons must be somehow responsible for its “sensory”-like properties, perhaps in ways similar to the behavior of unicellular organisms like flagellates in a medium. If we were organisms living in the subquantum level, we could possibly perceive entities like acrons as having a kind of “free will”, so as to face the consequences of the eurhythmic principle: either contribute to the general welfare or perish. In this manner, acrons would display some of the qualities of living matter that were reviewed in the previous sections. As to how acrons interact with each other to collectively enhance their potential, we do not know, but we can likewise hypothesize that the subquantum substrate functions in the manner cited for the cell cytoplasm. As mentioned before, this plasma-like structure conveys and responds to electromagnetic excitations, and a similar feature is required of the subquantum medium42.

We also assume that an acron’s emergence out of the quantum substratum is a manifestation of local entropy decrease, and if so, it is by far a most frequent phenomenon. Negentropy at the subquantum level might also be evidenced by an interpretation of tunnel effect - according to José Croca and the Lisbon group, tunneling achieves transportation across the quantum barrier with Δt ≈ 0, and is basically a phenomenon involving quantum coherence and amplification of the theta wave’s action. This might induce us to relate time

41 We had the opportunity of suggesting this departure from simple continuous or continuity-reducible mathematical tools in a communication, “On a possible contribution of transfinite mathematics towards eurhythmy”, presented at the congress Tempo, Devir (Time, Becoming), at Açores University, September 2011. 42 Perhaps it is erroneous to consider acrons and theta waves as two distinct entities, albeit interlinked by their joint trajectories. After all, there could exist nothing else but the quantum substrate, a medium where something like some type of the long-debated “ether” manifests itself, and where oscillations might arise as theta waves, so that acrons were nothing else than highly correlated resonance products of such oscillations. It would be interesting to approach the problems of relativity versus the existence of absolute velocities, and a privileged reference frame, from the viewpoint of a quantum substrate with “sensory” properties. This would provoke a new discussion of ether theories and to return to questions raised by Franco Selleri in his Lições de relatividade (Lisboa: Duarte Reis, 2004).

18 to real processes as experienced either by human perception or by instruments, even though neither our perception conscience nor our instruments have reached the subquantum level. That Δt ≈ 0 could reveal suspension (or virtual disappearance) of time as a constraint, thus reinforcing that entropy is not quite useful as a measure of the “arrow of time”. It is also conceivable that tunneling belongs to a family of phenomena that evidence a break-up of continuity, as time and space would not be continuum-differentiable in that range where tunneling is observed.

Physical systems may also display macroscopic collective behavior, as if their different subcomponents were cooperating with one another – for example in superfluidity and superconductivity at low temperatures, when entropic molecular disorder disappears and the system ends exhibiting some non-statistical behavior. On the other extreme of the scale there is spontaneous order formation in plasma vortices at extremely high temperatures, where disorder breaks down molecules and even atoms, and where one would thermodynamically expect very little work to be obtainable out of the system43. At middle range, non-equilibrium systems undergo transition to coherent activity as in the Bénard water convection cells. Macroscopic quantum effects have been demonstrated in at least one example, with amplitude quantization of an oscillating Doubochinski pendulum electromagnetically coupled with a magnet44.

Recapitulating the most conspicuous aspects of the new biological paradigm that might apply in parallel to the subquantum world, we comparatively suggest that:

 The subquantum level permits the emergence of organized heterogeneities, a dynamic structure where processes occur within a range of characteristic time and spatial intervals / An organism is an organized heterogeneity, a dynamic structure where processes occur within a range of characteristic time and spatial intervals.  Useful work can be done by acrons and theta waves through transfer of stored energy, be it self-energy out of inner structures, or derived from the configuration assumed by acrons and waves / Useful work can be done by molecules by a direct transfer of stored energy.

43 Within this magnitude range, constant annihilation and creation might be occurring everywhere in the Universe, involving cosmic material in general. A never-ending Universe is coherent with its functioning as an energy source, either internally by extraction of a constant down-scaling of inner structures or through sourcing “external” to the Universe. 44 Jonathan Tennenbaum, “Amplitude quantization as an elementary property of macroscopic vibrating systems”, 21st Century Science and Technology, v. 18, nº 4, Winter 2005-2006, pp. 50-63. Such a pendulum “can bring itself into resonance with the signal, generated by its own space-time modulation of the external field, thereby drawing the power needed to maintain a stationery regime”. On this basis, we could understand quantization as arising naturally from the “packaging” needed for resonances to manifest themselves, i.e. for building up the conditions for effectuating “jumps”, be it in the atom’s “orbitals”, or in our own human range, or extending to planetary orbits, and beyond.

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 Energy is trapped within the subquantum level, most intensely in the acrons and less intensely in the accompanying vibrations (theta waves) / Energy is trapped in living forms directly at the electronic level, stored as vibration and electronic bond energies.  Acrons and theta waves mobilize their energy coherently and make them available as necessary / Organisms mobilize their energies coherently and make them available as necessary.  At the subquantum level there is intercommunication among acrons and the respective theta waves through the subquantum substratum, which has some “connective” (ether-like) property / Organic systems work in intercommunication and with total participation of the cell fields, and connective tissues may be largely responsible for rapid intercommunication.  At the sub quantum level, coherent structures exhibit a non-statistical, collective activity generating long–range dynamical order, lending them a teleological aspect / For organisms, dissipative coherent structures exhibit a non-statistical, collective activity generating long–range dynamical order, lending them a teleological aspect.  Theta waves are coherently bound to the subquantum level, maintained far from thermodynamic equilibrium through acron emergence and cooperation; overall non-cooperation ensues pure entropic dissipation45 / The living system is a coherent photon field bound to living matter, maintained far from thermodynamic equilibrium through organism cooperation; cancerous growth results from overall non-cooperation.  Tunneling phenomena are involved in acron formation, whereby time resolution is suspended or transformed /Electron tunneling is involved in cell reproduction, whereby the time resolution is suspended or transformed.

The advantages of this unification of science include the overcoming of pure reductionism, and open up the possibility for a more encompassing natural philosophy. As in the past a vast new field arose when the proponents of “Naturphilosophie” early in he 19th Century insisted on looking for a common ground for the still separate sciences of electricity and magnetism, and at last succeeded with the magnetic needle experiment of Oersted; likewise the possibility of a unified science bridging the physical-chemical domain and the biological realm may bring a fruitful cooperation.

45 We introduce here a final note by imagining that the role of fluctuations is to allow for the destruction of symmetries, and the concomitant determinism which would mold a static Universe. Acrons considered as resonance of the subquantum substratum would perform like attractors in chaos theory. Disturbances of the equilibrium tend to move the system back in the direction determined by the initial configuration, but this in turn leads to interactions that may lead the system to dynamically evolve towards new configurations.

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