GENTLE INTRODUCTION TO QUANTUM BIOLOGY

The Dove Clinic for Integrated Medicine

By Dr Roger Taylor

As a student many years ago I was inspired by reading Schrodinger’s wonderful little book entitled “What is Life?”¹ From that I began to see how very far conventional biochemistry, which I was then studying, fell short of being an adequate scientific account of life. Erwin Schrodinger was one of the great figures who assisted at the birth of the quantum revolution. This revolution will, I think, come to be seen as a paradigm shift of comparable magnitude to that initiated by Copernicus some centuries earlier. And it is still going on, today, 50 years since Schrodinger’s book was published, it has yet to penetrate very far into mainstream biological science, and so hardly affects everyday thinking at all.

And yet, it seems to me, the revolution in thought begun by Schrodinger and his contemporaries must form part of the spiritual renewal which is so urgently needed if we are not to destroy our world, and each other. For quantum physics is a science of connection of holism; whereas classical physics is a science of separation, of reductionism. In the 60’s seeing how science was effectively “pulling the world to pieces”, people were asking how we could reverse this destructive process.Arthur Koestler was calling for a new “build-up-ism”². But at that time few people saw that quantum physics, which had been staring us in the face for 30 years, had in fact the makings of just such a holistic science.

What about biology? Throughout its history there has been an ongoing debate between mechanism and vitalism.Although mechanism has made the running so far, it has always pushed aside certain questions.  Fundamental among these is how we are to account for the unitary nature of a living organism: the way it responds as a whole to any stimulus – as if every part of it knew what every other part is doing.  Life has this holistic property at any scale, from an amoeba to an elephant, and whether or not it has a nervous system.  Quantum physics provides us with an exact science for which such a holistic view is only natural.  It lets us understand how the wavefunctions of protons and electrons which make up an atom or molecule sink their individuality to a common wavefunction: an irreducible holistic property.  I want to persuade you that a living organism is a quantum being, with a unified wavefunction, in the same way that an atom is.

Meanwhile, papers on quantum biology, which for so long have been confined to obscure symposia, are now finding their way into mainstream journals.  And a beautiful little book, a worthy successor to “What is Life?”, has just been published by Dr Mae-Wan Ho³.  What I write here owes much to this book.

Quantum Physics, in Simple Analogies

Well, what actually is quantum physics?  To understand this question requires first a simple step in perception, which anyone can take.  You simply have to discard, altogether, the notion of atoms as billiard balls, and replace it with a notion of them as vibrations.  It is just a new way of looking at the same old reality.

Consider the drawing in Fig.1.  In itself it just is: meaningless marks on paper.  But is we want to derive meaning from it, we have to add our own perceptual interpretation.  One such interpretation would see it as a young woman; another as an old woman.  The interesting thing is that you can only hold one of these interpretations in your mind at any one time.  To go from one to the other you have to make a jump: there is no way of doing it in stages.  Likewise, in physics you can either consider an electron as a wave or as a particle, but not both at the same time.

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or a young woman.

To introduce the notion of everything as vibrations, consider a taut string attached at both of its ends (Fig. 1a, b & c).  You will see immediately how it can form vibrating loops separated by quiescent nodes, and that the number of loops and nodes can only change by whole numbers (harmonics); there are no half-way states in between.  So long as the supports remain firm, it vibrates as a standing wave; there is no sense in which the waves are going anywhere – not even back and forth.  The energy is trapped.  But if one support is loosened, the energy will be released as a little travelling wave which shoots along the string (Fig. 2d).

Coherence

 (a)                                                                                                                                         (b)   

Fig. 3    (a) Dipole antenna emits coherent radio waves (classical coherence).

(b) When many dipoles emit waves independently (as in filament of light bulb) the waves become incoherent overall.

Energy Levels

To get higher notes in music you need more energy.  Think how, as you blow harder on a flute, the note suddenly flips to the next octave.  With this model in mind, it is easy to understand why it is that energy comes in an integral number of quanta, with no half-way states.  So long as the string is vibrating, it stores kinetic energy.  The more loops the higher the frequency, and the larger the amount of energy that is stored.  We shall refer to these discrete states of vibration as energy levels.

How does this idea apply to the atom?  As previously mentioned, the electrons lose their individuality to take up a wave-like pattern called a wavefunction.  An atomic nucleus can support different numbers of electrons, depending on its size.  These arrange themselves into concentric shells, or orbitals.  Each shell can only hold a certain number of electrons.  The shell nearest the nucleus fills up first.  With increasing nuclear size, as each successive shell is filled up, the next electrons have to go into another shell further out from the nucleus.

The most stable condition is where the electrons are as close to the nucleus as they can be.  When an input of energy resonates with the wavefunction of a particular shell (for example a light wave of the right frequency) then one or more electrons can stay, for a variable time, until it falls back again.  Meanwhile energy from the light wave is stored as vibrations of the displaced electron.  When the electron falls back to a more stable place in a lower energy shell, the energy is released again as a light wave of the same frequency.

This scheme has much in common with the standing wave in the string.  The progressively increasing energy levels as one proceeds further out from the nucleus are analogous to the increasing energy levels as the string is made to vibrate at progressively higher harmonics.  And in the same way as the trapped energy can be released as a travelling “string-wave”, so the electron falling back to a more stable orbital releases its extra energy as a travelling light-wave.

But there are important differences.  The string is made of matter, so the wave in it can be described by classical physics.  But the electrons in an atom sink their individuality into a common wavefunction.  Within this pattern there is no here nor there.  It is indivisible: an irreducible holistic property which cannot be described by treating the electrons as particles of matter, as one would in classical physics. 

When two atoms combine to form a molecule, some of their electrons are shared between them.  To do this they have to participate in new wavefunctions.  As molecules get larger, so the wavefunctions of shared electrons get more and more complicated.  Other forms of energy storage now become possible.  The molecule is flexible, and so can take up a number of modes of vibration, like the harmonics of the vibrating string.  The larger the molecule the more vibratory modes are possible.  In the end the energy levels get so close together that, for most practical purposes, they are treated as a continuum, according to classical physics.  Nevertheless all scientists accept the quantum vibrational account of matter as more fundamental.  At the level of individual atoms and molecules it clearly makes much more sense than the classical view of them as lumps of matter.

But can there still be a coherent vibrational mode (or a shared electronic wavefunction) throughout a really large molecule, such as a protein or DNA molecule?  And if there can be a wavefunction connecting the behaviour of the parts of a very large molecule, can there be one linking the behaviour of aggregates of molecules?  Or even larger: Schrodinger envisaged the possibility that there might be a wavefunction for the whole universe.  It is not clear where to draw the dividing line – or even if a line can be drawn.

In fact it has been possible in the laboratory to set up conditions where large numbers of atoms are linked by a common wavefunction.  This happens most easily at very low temperatures, where one sees the remarkable phenomena of superconductivity and superfluidity.  And even at normal temperatures large scale quantum behaviour can be seen in the laser.  See for example the ruby laser (Fig. 4a and b).  When fed with energy (“pumped”) by an intense flash of white light, certain atoms in the ruby rod make a quantum jump to a higher level of energy – represented by dots in the diagram.  The first atoms to release this energy (as red laser light) simulate the rest of them to do the same, so that they all fall back simultaneously to the lower energy level, resulting in an intense flash of red light.  Mirrors are placed at the two ends of the rod an exact number of wavelengths apart.  This favours the development of a standing wave, which ensures that the light waves from the individual atoms all come into phase, and so make up the coherent property which distinguishes laser light from ordinary light.  Note the analogy with the vibrating string – and also how the half-silvered mirror lets some of the energy escape as a travelling wave, just as releasing one of the supports did in Fig. 2.  But again: the standing wave in the laser is a quantum wavefunction, and thus links the behaviour of the individual atoms in a way which cannot be explained by classical physics.  It is “quantum-coherent”, where the wave in the string shows only classical coherence: a relatively messy affair - like sound waves, or the waves of the sea. 

            Fig. 4a  Ruby Laser

Subtle Fields

The concept of voltage, which we use every day, has always been recognised as a relative quantity – a difference in some absolute electrostatic potential.  Likewise magnetism depends on a more fundamental magnetic vector potential.  But there has been no way of detecting or measuring these absolute potentials – and indeed they have often been assumed to be no more than a mathematical convenience.  It was only after Aharonov and Bohm had proposed an experiment⁴, and a number of groups had successfully carried it out, that the reality of the magnetic vector potential became accepted.  Even now, it remains a very subtle field, and is not detectable by any conventional instrument.  Nevertheless, as we shall see, it can have real effects both on water and on living organisms.

In such experiments it is necessary to be sure that the results are indeed due to the potential and not simply to residual magnetism.  For this purpose a coil of toroidal shape can be used (Fig. 5).

            Fig. 5    Fields produced when a current is passed through a toroidal coil

Quantum Coherence in Liquids

Laser action is not confined to solids, such as ruby, but can easily be obtained in liquids and gases as well.  In spite of this, the quantum coherence which occurs in lasers is usually regarded as a special case.  In general, the individual molecules in most materials, and especially gases and liquids, are thought to relate to each other only by “random jostling”, without any larger wavefunctions to link them in a coherent way.  Nevertheless, there is a growing body, both of theory and of experimental evidence, to support a possibility for large-scale quantum coherence in fluids – especially water.

Water has many strange properties which do not fit the expectations of conventional physical theory.  At room temperature, for example, it should be a gas, rather than a liquid.  An Italian physicist, Emilio Del Giudice, has spent many years developing a theory which explains these strange properties ⁵.  This has led him to envisage water molecules moving not by random jostling, but in distinct patterns of dynamic order.  His theory explains how the energy can be efficiently trapped – as it has to be for such a pattern to be stable.  The freedom of movement of water molecules allows for astronomic numbers of alternative patterns, each of which can last indefinitely, so long as the water is treated carefully.  Too much heat or strong electromagnetic fields, however, would be expected to destroy the pattern. 

What evidence is there that such patterns actually exist?  Insofar as homoeopathy is medically effective, then it can be taken as evidence.  But in addition there is much evidence from experimental tests of homoeopathy – which has been largely ignored because unpublished outside homoeopathic journals.  Therefore the furore when Jacques Benveniste’s work was published in Nature^4b.  By an exhaustive series of ever more strictly controlled experiments he showed that a sample of water, from which every last molecule of the active substance has been diluted out, could still bring about easily observable effects on human blood cells in culture.

In homoeopathy the pattern of a substance is imprinted on the water by a procedure consisting of a number of stages of dilution, each followed by vigorous shaking (“succession”), until the last molecule of the substance has been diluted out.  Significantly, however, patterns can also be imprinted on water by means of electromagnetic fields.  This aspect has been much investigated by Dr Cyril Smith.  He has developed the ability to detect such frequency-information by means of dowsing^4c.  He holds his pendulum between the water to be tested, and the coil of a signal generator.  The pendulum responds whenever there is a resonance – as when the frequency in the coil matches that previously imprinted in the water.