Biophysics Week 1 (Week 10). Life and Living Systems

I know I'm a "living system" because...
I know I’m a ‘living system’ because... I am mass and angles and vectors and flesh. I breathe, pump, circulate, ambulate, sweat, think, consume, excrete. I move of my own volition. I am cells and organelles. I am tissue and organs and systems. I am constantly killing and regenerating myself. I grow. I evolve. I atrophy. I age. I refine. I am complex, and it’s kinda miraculous that all of these elements (me!) work together as they do. I can be awed.

Comments on one of the discussions... 

I was thinking about why Larry chose each of these articles for a class on biophysics, “Life and Living Systems”. They represent lots of thought-provoking topics at the interface of physics and biology. I found the one titled “Conscious or Not?” to be particularly interesting and, in a weird way, hopeful. A huge stressor in situations when a person is in a coma is that family and loved ones (and doctors) don’t really know what is going on with them. It seems that having a sense of how conscious someone is would be incredibly helpful and reassuring when faced with difficult decisions and even just a daily caretaking approach and how one might interact with the person, even if they can't respond. But perhaps there are situations in which it would make decisions even more difficult - what to do when there is an indication that someone is conscious but there is no hope of any degree of recovery? 

Week 8 - Descartes has a lot to answer for.

Descartes has a lot to answer for, indeed. Even though the reductionistic paradigm he spearheaded is less fashionable than in the not-so-distant past, I think that we (I) can barely even begin to comprehend the degree to which he has influenced how we in the West view the world.

 

Last semester we read an article for our tai ji and qi gong class on the history and basic principles of Neijing classical acupuncture by Ed Neal. He reviewed four primary differences between classical and modern scientific theory. One of the major differences he cited was the study of nature’s patterns versus its parts. “In classical sciences, the world of observable form is believed to result from intangible patterns of space/time rhythm. Because these underlying patterns are seen to antecede and give rise to the world of observable forms, traditional science prioritizes the study of these basic rhythms and patterns. From this viewpoint, the inherent scientific value in the manifest phenomena of nature lies in their ability to convey deeper insights into the intangible patterns of space/time motion that precede them. In contrast, modern scientific inquiry approaches the world through detailed investigations into the nature of forms and the material sub-structures of forms. Form and its component parts are examined and described with ever increasing levels of detail and differentiation, while the energetic patterns that generate them are mostly unrecognized.” How very true. And, I think, it started in large part with Descartes. 

Certainly this approach of partitioning everything into smaller and smaller bits makes each bit easier to examine and 'study' and (think we) comprehend, but the sense of control this sort of examination and study affords us is misleading - we are complex systems existing as part of even more complex systems. As much as we would like to 'hold something constant' or 'control for' other factors, nothing is constant but change. The units or packages we cut things into are not really so tidy.

Week 7 - Fractals as patterns of complex systems

Fractals are never-ending patterns formed by repetition - be it repetition of a process, a formula, or a shape... Fractals represent dynamic systems and show where and how small shifts can have big effects down the road in a feedback-driven system. Fractals frequently occur in nature - the branching of an oak tree, for example, or in the body, as with the branching of the bronchi in the lungs.

One might even consider that the paths of our lives and could also be visually represented by fractals. While procrastinating writing this, I randomly (“randomly”) clicked on a link from the Brain Pickings blog to hear Amanda Palmer read the poem by Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish Nobel laureate. The description, on Brain Pickings, fit right in with this theme (http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/02/amanda-palmer-reads-wislawa-szymborska/?mc_cid=2e1e781938&mc_eid=b96d4cf73a ):

“Amanda has previously lent her beautiful voice to my favorite Szymborska poem, “Possibilities,” and she now lends it to another favorite from this final volume, “Life While-You-Wait” — a bittersweet ode to life’s string of unrepeatable moments, each the final point in a fractal decision tree of what-ifs that add up to our destiny, and a gentle invitation to soften the edges of the heart as we meet ourselves along the continuum of our becoming.”

I've seen fractals described as "the pictures of chaos". Perhaps we, too, could be described as such.

Week 6 - Resonance in my world:

A few years ago, on a whim, I rented a cello for several months. It was so completely random, and it made me so happy. I am not a musician, and I had never had any interest whatsoever in stringed instruments like violin or cello. Aside from a 6-month flirtation with taiko drumming, I hadn’t played an instrument since I quit band in fifth grade. But I had recently decided that it would be fun to learn the guitar - easy to get ahold of, relatively inexpensive, and that almost everyone I know plays at least a little. Soon after telling a friend about this idea, I was raving about seeing a concert by Zoe Keating, an experimental cellist whose music I love. When my friend responded with the suggestion that I take up cello instead, I brushed off the idea as silly... and then found myself two days later in Best Music renting a cello. Why did this happen? I chalk it up to resonance. I simply loved how the low vibrations made me feel, particularly in my chest. I still had no interest really in learning how to play, but I really wanted to explore the sound and resonance. Although the cello ultimately went back to Best, in this, at least, I was successful. And it led to further explorations in resonance and sound healing, including learning to use tuning forks on the body, which eventually contributed to my decision to attend school in Chinese medicine.

Resonance is a concept that appears on my mindscape rather often. Resonance is not just sound. I think/talk about "resonating" with people, with ideas, with places. I think it stems in part from having done a lot of qi gong and tai qi, becoming attuned to how flow feels in my body, how everything feels to my body.  Perhaps I like the word 'resonance' because it sounds a little less 'California' than talking about vibes, but that's ultimately what it's about for me. Vibration. But perhaps 'resonance' is a more precise description, too, because, as Webster says, it's really about about vibrational relationships - "resonance: a sound or vibration produced in one object that is caused by the sound or vibration produced in another".

Class 5 - kinda off topic but inspired by this week's questions

When I was an undergraduate, I took a multidimensional math class. It was called something like 'Beyond the Third Dimension'. I took it because the instructor was brilliant and it pretty much blew my mind. I do have a knack for numbers, but my training and experience was not at the level of being able to comprehend 4th and 5th dimensional space, and I had no real intention of even trying. (There were two TAs for the class - one was involved in computer modeling of hyperspace, and the other was a poet. Fortunately, I was in section with the latter.) I just wanted exposure to some of those mind-blowing ideas, to have a little more idea of some of the things of which I was totally ignorant. In that I succeeded! My takeaway for the class was to get a very broad-concept grasp of things. 

In all of the talk in this class that we've had about dark matter and dark energy, part of what has been running through my head is what if some of the ‘missing’ matter/energy resides primarily in dimensions that most of us don't know how to perceive or access. Those brief moments when electrons appear in one place and then another place - who's to say those two places are not contiguous in some other dimensional space, that we are simply seeing projections of a more-than-3D object pass through 3-dimensional space? I don’t know enough to provide any substantiation or evidence for this idea – I just know enough to wonder…  (Alas, this wondering does not fall neatly into any of the questions for the week, but I started intending to write about fractals and sacred geometry in hyperspace, and this is where ended up.)

(By the way - if you have never read Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott, I highly recommend it. )

Class 4 - Energy, matter, and force

There are several dimensions by which the four fundamental forces - strong nuclear force, electromagnetic force, weak nuclear force, and gravitation force - might be compared:
- Relative strength
- Duration for which the force can act
- Messenger particle
- 'Direction', e.g. attractive or repulsive or both
- Mass
- Range/distance
- 'Behavior'
- Exceptions or limitations to when forces act
- Examples (which is perhaps the most elucidating)

Class 3 - Synchronicity

What evidence can you find for synchronicity?

I could offer any variety of cool stories, but I don’t think they qualify, one by one, as evidence for synchronicity. My background is in Western research, and although I can see the problem with it and even rail on its shortcomings and narrowness, my paradigm has not yet shifted to such a degree that I would call anecdotes “evidence” unless they were taken together and examined in some systematic way. 

I could also, I am sure, offer some complicated scientific substantiation to support the existence of synchronicity – but I am not well enough versed in that science to do so at this time. 

So I will just talk about the habit of synchronicity as evidence for its existence. I was listening to a podcast a week or two ago, and someone was talking about studies on self-described lucky and unlucky people. To sum it up really briefly, the unlucky people habitually honed in on the negative things that happened in a given situation, and the lucky people saw the positive. These researchers had the idea that ‘luck’ could be trained and went about working with people to do so. In a similar way, I think that synchronicity can be a frame of mind – people who practice noticing synchronous and serendipitous events end up experiencing more of them – like Renee and her lucky parking. Is the noticing just like a pair of (rose-colored) glasses? Or does it actually invite more "meaningful coincidences" into one's reality. (Does like attract like?) I suspect that it is a bit of both. Perhaps I'll try my own little synchronicity training experiment and report back at some point.