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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 amatter-based reality, the arrangement of whose partsin time is uniquely determined by certain dynamiclaws. By contrast, modern quantum physics revealsthat matter is not composed of matter, but reality ismerely potentiality. The world has a holistic structure,which is based on fundamental relations and not materialobjects, admitting more open, indeterministic developments.In this more flexible causal framework,inanimate and animate matter are not to be consideredas fundamentally different but as different order structuresof the same immaterial entity. In a stable configuration,effectively all the uncertainties are statisticallyaveraged out, thus the unique and deterministic behaviorof ordinary inanimate matter is exhibited;whereas in the case of statically unstable but dynamicallystable configurations, the "lively" features of theunderlying quantum structure have achance to surfaceto the mesocopic level and to be connected withwhat we observe as the phenomenon of life. This suppositioncan be more explicitly treated and clarified byidentifying the electric dipole moment of biomoleculesas the ordering parameter of the correspondingmacroquantum system. This has important consequencesfor biology and medicine. In particular, it suggeststhe existence of a quantum-based "software," essentialperhaps for the logistics of biologicalprocesses, which are hidden behind the matter/energy-based"hardware" that alone is considered in the conventionalapproach. In medicine it opens an opportunityto build bridges between conventional medicinebased essentially on the classical paradigm, and thevarious forms of complementary medicine, which havestrong affinities with the new features of the modernholistic worldview.

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

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