1. Organisms are open systems dependent on energy flow. Energy flows in together with materials, & waste products are exported, along with the spent energy that goes to make up entropy. And that is how living systems can, in principle, escape from the second law of thermodynamics
2. The second law, as you will recall, encapsulates the monotonous, unexceptional experience of everyday life: that all physical systems run down, ultimately decaying to homogeneous disorganization when all useful energy is finally exhausted, being converted into entropy.
3. Organisms appear anti-entropic while alive. Not only do they keep their organization intact, but also manage to have lots of energy for their activities. But how do they really manage their anti-entropic existence? What would a thermodynamic description of organisms be like?
4. Many physicists/chemists have stressed the importance of energy flow and dissipation to the organization of living things. But, in order to benefit from energy flow, the system must have some means of capturing and storing the energy.
5. Atomic organization lifts life up from thermodynamic equilibrium. Solar energy flows through Mars and Venus just as it flows through Earth, yet only Earth can capture the energy by means of the chlorophyll of green plants.
6. In common with all other organisms, green plants have an impressive metabolic network of biochemical reactions “downstream’’ of the energy capture, which stores the energy, not just for the plants, but also to pass along to the other organisms in the food web.
7. The entire ecosystem on earth is one big energy store maintained far away from thermodynamic equilibrium.
8. The key to understanding the thermodynamics of living organisms is, therefore, neither energy flow nor energy dissipation science, but energy storage under energy flow. That is what AMO physics is all about. Nature specializes in it.
9. Energy flow is of NO consequence unless the energy is trapped within the system where it circulates, to build up structures for storing the energy, and to do work before it is dissipated.
10. An organism arises when the loop of circulating energy somehow closes on itself to give a regenerating, reproducing life- cycle within which energy is mobilized, remaining stored as it is mobilized.
11.The energy goes into complex cascades of coupled cyclic processes within the system before it's allowed to dissipate to the outside. These cascades of cycles span the entire gamut of space-times from slow to fast, from local to global, that all together, make up the life-cycle
12. Each cycle is simply a domain of coherent energy storage. As you will recall, coherent energy is energy that can do work because it is all coming and going together. Water & sunlight create coherent domains in cells.
13. The cycles within the life cycle are all interlinked in a very special way, in order to feed off the one-way energy flow. Picture them as a complicated system of eddies forming in a pool off the main river stream.
14. The many-fold cycles of life coupled to energy flow in life = ΔG positive which are designed to couple to the thermodynamically downhill ones, i.e., those yielding energy =ΔG negative. Humans can break this coupling with bad designs around light
15. The ATP/ADP couple, ubiquitous to the living system, effectively turns all biosynthetic and other energy-requiring uphill reactions downhill. Life is literally downhill, or, on a more optimistic and cheery note, effortless and spontaneous, all the way
16. That living processes are organized in cycles is also intuitively obvious by a casual examination of the metabolic chart in any biochemistry book. Biochemistry alone is impotent to explain life without the photons levers it requires to explain its enzymatic flux/storage.
17. Apart from the prominent cycles such as the tricarboxylic acid cycle and the cyclic interconversion of ATP/ADP, NADH/NAD and other redox (reduction-oxidation) intermediates, many more cycles and epicycles are entangled in the metabolic network.
18. Another prominent way in which cycles appear in living systems is the wide spectrum of biological rhythms — with periods ranging from milliseconds for electrical discharges of single cells to circadian and circa-annual cycles in whole organisms and populations of organisms.
19. These cycles interlock with metabolic cycles to give the organism a complex, multidimensional, entangled space-time, very far removed from the simple, linear Newtonian space and time of mechanical physics.
20. There are some very suggestive observations that all these solar/dark rhythms are indeed entangled, or coupled together.
21. Geneticists have discovered that mutations in two genes of Drosophila, period and timeless, which speed up, slow down, or abolish circadian rhythm, also cause corresponding changes in the millisecond wing beat cycle of the male fly's love song!
22. This correlation spans seven orders of magnitude of characteristic timescales, reflecting the full extent of coupled energy storage and mobilization in the living system.
23. Energy is stored and mobilized over all space-times according to the relaxation times and volumes of the processes involved. The result is that organisms can take advantage of two different ways to mobilize energy with maximum efficiency
24. First, non-equilibrium transfer in which stored energy (light) is transferred before it is thermalized, & quasi-equilibrium transfer, which is slow enough to allow all thermalized, and other exchanging energies to equilibrate, for which the free energy change approaches zero
25. This occurs in accordance with conventional thermodynamic considerations. Because all the modes of activity are coupled, the energy input into any mode is readily shared or delocalized over all modes, and conversely, energy from all modes can become concentrated into any mode
26. Another way to express the same thing is that energy from any point can spread throughout the system, or become concentrated at any point from all over the system. In technical terms, energy coupling in the living system is symmetrical.
27. Symmetrical energy coupling & cyclical flows are both predicted from the thermodynamics of the steady state, in the form, of Onsager's reciprocity relationship & of Morowitz's theorem. Do your centralized MD talk about this with you? If not why did you hire them?
28. Decentralized clinicians like me teach our patients that Onsager's reciprocity relationship states that for a system of many coupled linear flows under conjugate forces will always be symmetric mathematically.
29. Morowitz's theorem states that the flow of energy through the system from a source (sun) to a sink (cell) will lead to at least one cycle in the system at a steady state, provided that the energy is trapped and stored within the system.
30. This important theorem is the only attempt to account for cycles in the living system, it implies that the steady state — at which global balance is maintained — must harbor nonlinear processes. Non-linear processes in cells is all carried about by UV bio-photons.
31. Nearly 100 years ago the Russian biologist A. Gurwitsch put forth the hypothesis that weak ultraviolet radiation comes out from the living tissues, and it is responsible for the regulation of cell growth. He called this radiation “mitogenetic radiation”.
32. However, this interesting result was forgotten by the scientific community and mitogenetic radiation has been considered an artifact for many years. Many papers like this one below are in the literature.
33. With the improvement of the methods to detect the weak level of light radiation emitted from living cells & the increase in understanding of quantum optics, there has been a renewed interest in this phenomenon.
34. Colli & Facchini in the 1950s and Fritz Popp in the 1980s did extensive work in this field to understand in detail the origin and the meaning of such ultra-weak emissions, called bio-photons. Cells/blood are plasma that mimics the sun's ability optically.
35. Bio-photons are an endogenous production of photons in and from cells and organisms, and this emission is characteristic of alive organisms. This emission is entirely different from the normal bioluminescence observed in some simple as well as complex organisms in the sea.
36. Biophotons are a 1000 X weaker. It's present in all living organisms from plants to human beings! sciencealert.com/you-can-t-see-…
37. It's also different from thermal radiation because its intensity is many orders of magnitude ^ than the one calculated by Planck’s law in the visible energy range @ room temps.
38. The main characteristics of biophotons measured up to now are the following: the total intensity of the emission is quite low and goes from several to some hundred photons/sec per cm2 surface of the living system.
39. The spectral intensity is quite flat for wavelengths ranging between 200 and 800 nm. After any type of stress (chemical agents, excitation by any light, temperature) the emission increases by almost a factor of 10 and relaxes to the normal values quite slowly.
40. It follows hyperbolic functions rather than an exponential law. Finally, the photocount statistics that account for the probability of having N photons within some time interval seem to follow a Poisson distribution.
41. Poisson distribution tells us all life is based on the probabilities in light frequencies. The biophoton emission is also very sensitive to the biological characteristics of the system under examination.
42. Moreover, for this reason, these types of measures have been successfully applied to medical diagnostics, agriculture, and ecology today but not to centralized healthcare because it would limit Pharma profits
43. Onsager's reciprocity relationship is coupled to biophoton release & his theory has been extended to the far from equilibrium regime for systems containing many enzymes working together (TCA cycle) and more recently, for “infinite” (or sufficiently large) quantum systems!
44. I believe some form of Onsager's reciprocity relationship holds in all living systems to account for the ready mobilization of energy — why we can have energy at will and.....
45. — for the linear relationships between steady-state flows and thermodynamic forces outside the range of equilibrium which we have actually observed in many biological systems.
46. Linearity in biological processes can arise in enzymes operating near a “multidimensional inflection point” (i.e., a local minimum or maximum) far away from thermodynamic equilibrium, if some of the rate constants of different reactions are linked. Light links all enzymes.
47. Implications? If your metabolic cycles remain coupled properly to the circadian cycles of the sun you will remain healthy because of the ideas buried in the science of Onsager's reciprocity.
48. In the properly coupled cell, the living system is a superposition of non-dissipative cyclic processes and dissipative irreversible processes, so that Onsager's reciprocity relationship applies only to the former.
49. In other words, it applies to coupled processes for which the net entropy production is balanced out to zero. Cells that are coupled to light and dark cycles have no problem gaining a negative entropy state while living. I hope you like this walk thru quantum biology.
A. CLOCK and BMAL1 are positive regulators of circadian gene expression, and PER and CRY are the NEGATIVE FEEDBACK LOOP regulators that operate under day and night cycles. These are the positive and negative feedback arms of the circadian mechanism.
B. Both loop must be coupled properly to terrestrial light to operate well and control all growth and metabolism, protein synthesis and hormone production and release. This increases the periodicity of the SCN. It also controls receptor biology. It controls EVERYTHING.
C. If they are not properly coupled to the light and dark cycles the eventual results are the extinction of both sides of the feedback loop. So when sunlight is absent we lose control of the negative feedback loop of the circadian mechanism controlled by PER2 in the SCN
2. My answer: The wisdom we lack, in all probability, will always exceed the wisdom that we have! This creates the pressures we sense in life to motivate us to action by thinking.
3. It's far too easy to confuse the difference between knowledge and wisdom. The dark TV saga, Breaking Bad, is mostly about that difference: it's one thing to know how to do something, but it's another thing to know when/why to do it.
1. Energy transfer via heat, on which the science of thermodynamics is based, is by far the least efficient and nonspecific form of transfer. The biosphere does not make its living by absorbing heat from the environment.
2. No organism can live like a heat engine, nor can it obtain its energy or negative entropy by feeding on carbon or diamond pulp and burning it with oxygen.
3. Instead, life depends on catching an excited electron quite precisely — by means of specific light absorbing pigments — and then tapping off its energy as it falls back towards the ground state.
Today's PSA: MS begins with ALAN. ALAN alters the circadian control of ADH/AVP which is released to excess to cause an opening of the BBB. ADH/AVP modulates BBB permeability = vasopressin antagonism should be an MS treatment = sunlight
2. Harnessing light energy helps life live longer. When will you all get that message? Sunlight rejuvenates mitochondrial membrane redox potential to slow aging and this finding translates across all species. newsroom.uw.edu/news/roundworm…
3. Is Nature's clue found in vasopressin molecular structure? They are. Vasopressin is a posterior pituitary hormone which means it has a direct connection to the retina and the SCN. It tells us sunlight is the electromagnetic stimulus that vasopressin reacts to.
The UN, press, & media have no legal right to dictate the practice of medicine. No right to intimidate or coerce physicians or patients. No right to employ propaganda to advance the economic interests of the pharmaceutical industry. We all must insist that this stop immediately
2. Remember Twitter you have the same medical degree as Bill Gates & CNN. Good critical thinking is the foundation of science and a democratic republic. Science requires the critical use of reason in experimentation and theory confirmation.
3. The proper functioning of a liberal democracy requires citizens who can think critically about social issues to inform their judgments about proper governance and to overcome biases and prejudice.
2. We as a group need to actively do things to change the incentives for centralized healthcare entities. Adaptability is an anti-fragile design and it is not based on equilibrium or balance.
3. Balance is a misnomer in life. We can achieve solid integration. Your hand opens & closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your design is found in contracting and expanding like two beautifully balanced and coordinated bird's wings
4. Many people seek balance when they should seek anti-fragility in centralized healthcare systems. When we integrate life, work, rest, and play it allows us to accept the dynamics life deals.