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Are Biology and Medicine Only Physics? Building Bridges Between Conventional and Complementary Medicine

Max-Planck-Institut für Physik (Werner-Heisenberg-Institut)

In classical physics, the world is considered as a matter-based reality, the arrangement of whose parts in time is uniquely determined by certain dynamic laws. By contrast, modern quantum physics reveals that matter is not composed of matter, but reality is merely potentiality. The world has a holistic structure, which is based on fundamental relations and not material objects, admitting more open, indeterministic developments. In this more flexible causal framework, inanimate and animate matter are not to be considered as fundamentally different but as different order structures of the same immaterial entity. In a stable configuration, effectively all the uncertainties are statistically averaged out, thus the unique and deterministic behavior of ordinary inanimate matter is exhibited; whereas in the case of statically unstable but dynamically stable configurations, the "lively" features of the underlying quantum structure have a chance to surface to the mesocopic level and to be connected with what we observe as the phenomenon of life. This supposition can be more explicitly treated and clarified by identifying the electric dipole moment of biomolecules as the ordering parameter of the corresponding macroquantum system. This has important consequences for biology and medicine. In particular, it suggests the existence of a quantum-based "software," essential perhaps for the logistics of biological processes, which are hidden behind the matter/energy-based "hardware" that alone is considered in the conventional approach. In medicine it opens an opportunity to build bridges between conventional medicine based essentially on the classical paradigm, and the various forms of complementary medicine, which have strong affinities with the new features of the modern holistic worldview.

Key Words: life • quantum physics • microbiology • complementary medicine

Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Vol. 22, No. 5, 338-351 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/027046702236886


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