Faith versus Science: Did a God Create the Universe?

Recently a celebrated British physicist made the headlines for his comments regarding science and religion. This article presents the views, opinions and commentary of Professor Stephen Hawking on this topic. Readers are encouraged to present their own views in the comment section and participate in the debates on the issues raised.

Hello my name is Stephen Hawking, physicist, cosmologist and something of a dreamer. Although I cannot move and have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free. Free to explore the deepest questions of the universe. Among them the deepest of all, Is there a god who created and controls the universe, from the stars and the planets, to you and me? Finding out takes us on a journey on the Laws of Nature for there I think lies the answer to the age old mystery of how the universe was made and how it really works. Check it out.

I recently published a book that asked if a god created the universe. I caused something of a stir. People got upset that a scientist should have anything to say on matters of religion. I have no desire to tell anyone what to believe but for me asking whether God exists is a valid question for science. . After all is it is hard to think of a more important or fundamental mystery than what or who created and controls the universe.

Long ago the answer was almost always the same, gods made everything. The world was a scary place so even people as tough as the Vikings believed in supernatural beings to make sense of natural phenomena like lightening or storms. The Vikings had many different gods. Thor (from whose name we have the day named Thursday) was the god of lightening. Another god Aegir (from whom we have the Aegean Sea) caused stormy seas. But the god they feared the most was named Skoll. He was responsible for the terrifying natural event which we now call a solar eclipse. Skoll was a wolf god who lived in the sky and sometimes he would eat the sun causing the dreadful moment when day turned to night. Without a scientific explanation imagine how disturbing it would have been to see the sun vanish. The Vikings responded in the only way that made sense to them. They tried to scare away the wolf, by shouting incantations at it and praying loudly to Odin their supreme god. The Vikings believed that their actions caused the sun to return. Of course we now know they had nothing to do with it. The sun would have returned anyway. It turns out the universe is not as supernatural or mysterious as it seems. But it takes more courage the Vikings had to discover the truth. Mere mortals like you and I can understand how the universe works. This was realized long before the Vikings, in ancient Greece.

In about 300 BC, a philosopher named Aristarchus was fascinated by eclipses too, especially eclipses of the moon. He was brave enough to question whether they were really caused by gods. Aristarchus was a true scientific pioneer. He studied the heavens carefully and reached a bold conclusion. He realized that the eclipse was really the shadow of the earth passing over the moon, and not a divine event. Liberated by this discovery he was able to work out what was really going on above his head and draw diagrams that showed the true relationship of the sun, the earth, and the moon. From there he reached even more remarkable conclusions. He deduced that the earth was not the center of the universe as everyone had thought, but instead orbits the sun. In fact understanding this arrangement explains all eclipses. When the moon casts its shadow on the earth that is a solar eclipse, and when the earth shades the moon, that is a lunar eclipse. But Aristarchus took it even further. He suggested that the stars were not chinks in the floor of heaven as his contemporaries believed but that stars were other suns like ours, only a very long long way away. What a stunning realization it must have been. The universe is a machine governed by principles or laws, laws that can be understood by the human mind. I believe that the discovery of these laws has been humankind’s greatest achievement for it is these Laws of Nature as we now call them that will tell us whether we need a god to explain the universe at all.

For centuries it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse inflicted by God. While I suppose it’s possible I upset someone up there, I prefer to think everything can be explained another way by the Laws of Nature. So what exactly is a law of nature and why is it so powerful? I will show you with a game of tennis. Tennis is governed by two sets of laws. One set is manmade, the rules of the game. They govern things such as the size of the court, the height of the net and what determines if a shot is in or a shot is out. These rules can conceivably be changed if the governing body of tennis so desired. But the other set of laws that apply to the game are fixed, immutable. They govern what will happen to the ball when it is hit. The force and angel of the racket strike determines exactly what happens next. The Laws of Nature are a description of how things actually work in the past, present, and future. In tennis the ball always goes exactly where they (the Laws of Nature) say it will. And there are many other laws at work here too. They govern everything that is going on from how the energy of the shot is produced in the player’s muscles to the speed at which the grass grows beneath their feet. But what is really important is these physical laws as well as being unchangeable are universal. They apply not just to the flight of a ball, but to the motion of a planet and everything else in the universe. Unlike laws made by humans, the Laws of Nature cannot ever be broken. That is why they are so powerful, and when seen from a religious standpoint, controversial too. If you accept as I do that the Laws of Nature of nature are fixed then it doesn’t take long to ask what role is there for God? This is a big part of the contradiction between science and religion. And although my views have recently made headlines it is actually an ancient conflict.

Back in 1277 Pope John XXI felt so threatened by the idea of Laws of Nature that he decreed them a heresy. Unfortunately that did nothing to change the law governing gravity. A few months later (during a storm) the palace roof collapsed and fell on the Pope’s head ( and killed him). But organized religion soon found a solution. For the next few hundred years it was simply stated that the Laws of Nature were the work of God, and God could break them if he wished to. This view was further reinforced that our perfect blue planet was quite still at the center of it all, and all the stars and planets rotated around the earth like some carefully designed clockwork. Aristarchus’s idea to the contrary had been long forgotten. But humans are naturally inquisitive and some such as Galileo Galilei could not help but look at “God’s clockwork” once more.

It was the year 1609, and this time the results would change everything. Galileo is the founder of modern day science and one of my heroes. He thought, as I do, that if you looked at the universe closely enough, you could discern what was really going on. He was so determined that he perfected lenses that could for the first time magnify the night sky by 20 times. Carefully, he assembled them into a telescope. From his house in Padua (in Italy) he used this telescope to study Jupiter, night after night, and made a wonderful discovery, three tiny dots very close to the giant planet. To begin with he thought the dots must be very faint stars but then as he watched for a few nights he saw that they moved. And then a fourth dot appeared. Sometimes one of them would vanish behind Jupiter and then reappear. He realized they had to be moons circling the vast planet. Here was proof positive that at least some objects do not orbit the earth. Inspired by this discovery, Galileo went on to prove that the earth must in fact orbit the sun. Aristarchus had been right all along. Galileo’s discoveries triggered a revolution in thought that would ultimately loosen the grip of religion over science. But back in the 17th century they got him into a lot of trouble with the church. He narrowly avoided execution by recanting his so called heresy and was confined to house arrest for the last nine years of his life. Legend has it that even as he confessed his sin he muttered “…but it does move …” Over the next 300 years, as more and more of the Laws of Nature were discovered science began to explain all kinds of things from lightening, earthquakes and storms, to what makes the stars shine. Each new discovery further removed the need for a god. After all if you know the science behind an eclipse you are much less likely to believe in wolf-gods that live in the sky.

Science does not deny religion, it just offers a simpler alternative. Yet several mysteries remain. After all if the earth moves could it be God that moves it? Ultimately did God create a universe in the first place? In 1985 I attended a conference on cosmology at the Vatican in Rome. The gathering of scientists had an audience with Pope John Paul II. He told us that it was OK to study the workings of the universe, but we should not ask questions about its origin for that was the work of God. I am glad to say that I for one haven’t followed his advice. I can’t simply switch off my curiosity. I believe it is a cosmologist’s duty to try to work out where the universe came from. Luckily it’s not as difficult as it seems. Despite the complexity and variety of the universe, it turns out that to make one you need just three ingredients.

Let’s imagine we could list them in some kind of cosmic cookbook. So, what are the three ingredients we need to cook up a universe? The first is matter, stuff that has mass. Matter is all around us, in the ground beneath our feet, and out in space. Dust, rock ice, liquids, vast clouds of gas, massive spirals of stars each containing billions of suns stretching away for incredible distances. The second ingredient you need is energy. Even if we’ve never thought about it, we all know what energy is. Something we encounter everyday. Look up at the sun, and you can feel it on your face. Energy produced by a star 93 million miles away. Energy permeates the universe, driving the processes that keep it a dynamic and endlessly changing place. So we have matter and we have energy, the third thing we need to build a universe is space, lots of space. You can call the universe many things, awesome, beautiful, violent? But one thing you can’t call it is cramped. Wherever we look we see space and more space, and more space stretching in all directions, enough to make your head spin. So where could all this matter, energy, and space come from? We had no idea until well into the 20th century. The answer came from the insights of one man, probably the most remarkable scientist who has ever lived. His name was Albert Einstein. Sadly I never got to meet him since I was only thirteen when he died. Einstein realized something remarkable, that two of the main ingredients needed to make a universe, mass and energy, are basically the same thing, two sides of the same coin if you like. His famous equation, E=mc^2 simply means mass can be thought of as a kind of energy and vice versa. So instead of three ingredients we can say that the universe has just two, energy and space. So where did all this energy and space come from? The answer was found after decades of work by scientists. Space and energy were spontaneously created in an event we now call the Big Bang. At the moment of the Big Bang, an entire universe full of energy came into existence, and with it space. It all inflated just like a balloon being blown up. So where did all this energy and space come from? How does an entire universe full of energy, the awesome vastness of space and everything in it simply appear out of nothing? For some this is where God comes back into the picture, it was God that created the energy and the space, the Big Bang was the moment of creation. But science tells a different story. At the risk of getting myself into trouble, I think we can understand far more of the natural phenomena that terrified the Vikings. We can even go beyond the beautiful symmetry of matter and energy discovered by Einstein. We can use the Laws of Nature to grasp the very origins of the universe and discover if the existence of a god is the only way to explain it.

As I was growing up in England after the Second World War, it was a time of austerity. We were taught that you never get something for nothing. But now after a lifetime of work I think that in fact you can get a whole universe for free. The great mystery at the heart of the Big Bang is to explain how an entire fantastically enormous universe of space and energy can materialize out of nothing. The secret lies in one the strangest facts about our cosmos. The Laws of Physics demand the existence of something called Negative Energy. To get your head around this weird but crucial concept let me draw an analogy. Imagine a man wants to build a hill on a flat piece of land. The hill will represent the universe. To make this hill he digs a hole in the ground and uses that soil to build his hill. But of course he is not just making a hill, he is also making a hole, in effect, a negative version of the hill. The stuff that was in the hole has now become the hill, so it all perfectly balances out. This is the principal behind was happened right at the beginning of the universe. When the Big Bang produced the vast amount of positive energy, it simultaneously produced the same amount of negative energy. In this way the positive and the negative add up to zero, always. It’s another law of nature. So where is all this negative energy today? It is in the third ingredient in our cosmic cook book. It’s in space. This may sound odd but due to the Laws of Nature concerning gravity and motion, laws that are among the oldest in science, space itself is a vast store of negative energy, enough to ensure that everything adds up to zero. I will admit that unless mathematics is your thing, this is hard to grasp but it’s true. The endless web of billions upon billions of galaxies each pulling on one another by the force of gravity acts like a giant storage device. The universe is like an enormous battery storing negative energy. The positive side of things, the mass and the energy we see today is like the hill. The corresponding hole or negative side of things is spread throughout space. So what does that mean on our quest to find out if there is a god? It means that if the universe adds up to nothing then you don’t need a god to create it. The universe is the ultimate free lunch.

Since we know that the positive and negative in the universe adds up to zero all we have to do now is work out what or dare I say who triggered the whole process in the first place. What could cause the spontaneous appearance of a universe? At first it seems a baffling problem. After all in our daily lives things don’t simply materialize out of the blue. You can’t just click your fingers and summon up a cup of coffee when you feel like one, can you? You have to make it up of other stuff like coffee beans, water, perhaps a milk, and sugar. But travel down into this coffee cup, through the milk particles, down to the atomic level and right down to the sub-atomic level, and you enter a world where conjuring something out of nothing is possible, at least for a short while. That’s because at this scale, particles such as protons behave according to the Laws of Nature we call quantum mechanics and they really can appear at random, stick around for a while, and then vanish again, to reappear somewhere else. Since we know the universe itself was once very small, smaller than a proton in fact, this means something quite remarkable. It means the universe itself, in all of its mind boggling vastness and complexity can simply have popped into existence without violating the known Laws of Nature. From that moment on, vast amounts of energy were released as space itself expanded, a place to store all the negative energy needed to balance the books. But of course the critical question is raised again. Did God create the quantum laws that allowed the Big Bang to occur?

In a nutshell do we need a god to set it all up so that the Big Bang could bang? I have no desire to offend anyone of faith but I think science has a more compelling explanation than a divine creator. This explanation is made possible because of something strange about the principle of cause and effect. Our everyday experience makes us convinced that everything that happens must be caused by something that occurred earlier in time. So it’s natural for us to assume that something, perhaps God, must have caused the universe to come into existence. But when we’re talking about the universe as a whole it isn’t necessarily so. Let me explain. Imagine a river flowing down a mountainside. What caused the river? Well, perhaps the rain, rain that fell earlier in the mountains. But then, what caused the rain? A good answer would be the sun, the sun that shone on the ocean and lifted water vapor up into the sky and made clouds. Ok, so what caused the sun to shine? Well if we look inside we see the process known as fusion in which hydrogen atoms join to form helium releasing vast quantities of energy in the process. So far so good. Where does the hydrogen come from? Answer? The Big Bang. But here is the crucial bit. The Laws of Nature themselves tell us that not only could the universe have popped into existence like a proton, and have acquired nothing in terms of energy, but also that it is possible that nothing caused the Big Bang. Nothing. The explanation lies back with the theories of Einstein and his insights into how space and time in the universe are fundamentally intertwined. Something very wonderful happed to time at the instant of the Big Bang. Time itself began. To understand this mind boggling idea, consider one of these, a black hole floating in space. A typical black hole is star, so massive it has collapsed in on itself. It’s so massive that not even light can escape its gravity, which is why it’s almost perfectly black. Its gravitational field is so powerful it doesn’t only distort and warp light, but also time. To see how, imagine a clock is being sucked into it. As the clock gets closer and closer to the black hole, it begins to get slower and slower. Time itself begins to slow down. Now imagine the clock as it enters the black hole. Well, assuming it could withstand the extreme gravitational forces, the clock would actually stop. It stops not because it’s broken but because inside the black hole itself, time doesn’t exist. That is exactly what happed at the start of the universe. The role played by time at the beginning of the universe is, I believe, the final key to removing the need for a grand designer and revealing how the universe created itself.

As we travel back in time towards the moment of the Big Bang, the universe gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller until it finally comes to a point with the whole universe is in a space so small that it is in effect a single infinitesimally small, infinitesimally dense black hole. And just as with modern day black holes floating around in space, the Laws of Nature dictate something quite extraordinary. They tell us that here too time itself must come to a stop. You can’t get to a time before the Big Bang because there was no “before the Big Bang”. We have finally found something that doesn’t have a cause because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means there is no possibility of a creator because there is no time for a creator to have existed. Since time itself began at the moment of the Big Bang, it was an event that could not have been caused or created by anyone or anything. So science has given us the answer we set out to discover, an answer that took more than three thousand years of human endeavor. We have discovered how the Laws of Nature acting on the mass and energy of the universe, started a process that would eventually produce us, sitting here on our planet, pretty pleased at having worked it all out. So when people ask me did a god create the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang, so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the earth. The earth is a sphere, it doesn’t have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.

We are each free to believe what we want and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is there is no god. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization. There is probably no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that I am extremely grateful.

kwaku ba, January 2012

The 48-hour forex movement strategy

By Azeez Mustapha

Markets often experience long, smooth upward pushes punctuated by violent pullbacks, brought about by some fundamental event. This isn’t surprising, especially when we delve deeper into market dynamics.
Market studies have shown that the seriousness of market metamorphosis could be decided by the buying and selling pressure. During a serious price movement, pressure gains momentum. Intensifying moves in an equilibrium territory may portend an exponential rise in price pressure. Moves that become less intensified may forecast a counter-trend rise in pressure.
Expanding pressure brings with it a more colossal directional move, but you should not overlook the seemingly refractory nature of the financial markets. The most crucial issue is that it is not just the pressure itself. With any given market move, don’t assume there is a bear for every bull; therefore, market pressure is ineffectual. If this were true, the markets would be caught in never-ending consolidation. Fear and greed of bulls and bears propels the markets.
Transaction pressure and market movements reveal price dynamics. Consider buying/selling pressure as a lopsided attempt, while the market action is the aftermath. If bears are inclined to close orders at all costs, there might be a propensity to do so at the bid rather than the offer. If purchasing need is scantily situated beneath the price, then the markets would be propelled toward the downside until bears get satisfied. Alternatively, if bulls are inclined to act, they may purchase the offer and not sit on the bid. If there is not much resistance, the market may move higher until the bulls are satisfied.
We can capture the tendency of the market to swing from one short-term extreme to the other with a technical-based trading strategy that brings with it the added benefit of simplicity.

Swing strategyThe 48-hour movement system uses a simple moving average (SMA) and the relative strength index (RSI), both on a 20-period basis. It is most effective trading currency pairs and crossrates (for example, EUR/JPY, AUD/JPY, EUR/USD, AUD/USD, EUR/NZD, EUR/CAD, GBP/USD, GBP,CHF). It trades on hourly charts. The rules are simple: Go long when the price is above the SMA and the RSI is above 60. Go short when price is below the SMA and the RSI is below 40.
The trade triggers are just part of the plan, however. Just as important are position sizing and risk-control guidelines. Maintain a stop loss 90 pips from the entry price. Take profits 180 pips from the entry price. Move the stop loss to breakeven once prices moves 50 pips in your favor. As for size, smaller positions are auspicious. Trade $2,000 lots.
Finally, if the stop loss or the profit target aren’t hit within 48 hourly bars, exit the position.



 

Are humans really beings of light?

http://www.viewzone.com/dna.html

I get lots of suggestions for stories, and I really appreciate them. But some of them are too good to be true. An example of this was a story of a giant human skeleton -- maybe 40 feet tall -- that was discovered by a Russian archaeological team. The story had photos and links accompanying it and looked promising. But when the links were researched they went in a circle. Each link used the other link as the source. Finally the elements of the photos turned up and we recognized a good Photoshop job had fooled everyone.

I had this same experience this week when I was sent an article where a Russian (again) scientist, Pjotr Garjajev, had managed to intercept communication from a DNA molecule in the form of ultraviolet photons -- light! What's more, he claimed to have captured this communication from one organism (a frog embryo) with a laser beam and then transmitted it to another organisms DNA (a salamander embryo), causing the latter embryo to develop into a frog!

But this was just the beginning.

Dr. Garjajev claims that this communication is not something that happens only inside the individual cells or between one cell and another. He claims organisms use this "light" to "talk" to other organisms and suggested that this could explain telepathy and ESP. It was like human beings already had their own wireless internet based on our DNA. Wow!

I tried to find a scientific journal that had this experiment. All I could find were blogs and other websites that carried the same story, word for word, without any references. That is until I stumbled on the work of Fritz-Albert Popp [right]. Then everything I had just read seemed very plausible.

Fritz-Albert Popp thought he had discovered a cure for cancer. I'm not convinced that he didn't.

It was 1970, and Popp, a theoretical biophysicist at the University of Marburg in Germany, had been teaching radiology -- the interaction of electromagnetic (EM) radiation on biological systems. Popp was too early to worry about things like cellphones and microwave towers which are now commonly linked with cancers and leukemia. His world was much smaller.

He'd been examining two almost identical molecules: benzo[a]pyrene, a polycyclic hydrocarbon known to be one of the most lethal carcinogens to humans, and its twin (save for a tiny alteration in its molecular makeup), benzo[e]pyrene. He had illuminated both molecules with ultraviolet (UV) light in an attempt to find exactly what made these two almost identical molecules so different.

Why Ultra-violet light?

Popp chose to work specifically with UV light because of the experiments of a Russian biologist named Alexander Gurwitsch who, while working with onions in 1923, discovered that roots could stimulate a neighboring plant's roots if the two adjacent plants were in quartz glass pots but not if they were in silicon glass pots. The only difference being that the silicon filtered UV wavelengths of light while the quartz did not. Gurwitsch theorized that onion roots could communicate with each other by ultraviolet light.

[Above] All vibrations of energy are part of the electro-magnetic spectrum. These include electrical energy, heat, sound, light, radio waves and radioactive waves. UV light is merely a small portion of the spectrum of EM energy with a very short wavelength.

What Popp discovered was that benzo[a]pyrene (the cancer producing molecule) absorbed the UV light, then re-emitted it at a completely different frequency -- it was a light "scrambler". The benzo[e]pyrene (harmless to humans), allowed the UV light to pass through it unaltered.

Popp was puzzled by this difference, and continued to experiment with UV light and other compounds. He performed his test on 37 different chemicals, some cancer-causing, some not. After a while, he was able to predict which substances could cause cancer. In every instance, the compounds that were carcinogenic took the UV light, absorbed it and changed or scrambled the frequency.

There was another odd property of these compounds: each of the carcinogens reacted only to light at a specific frequency -- 380 nm (nanometres) in the ultra-violet range. Popp kept wondering why a cancer-causing substance would be a light scrambler. He began reading the scientific literature specifically about human biological reactions, and came across information about a phenomenon called 'photorepair'.

Photorepair

It is well known from biological laboratory experiments that if you blast a cell with UV light so that 99 per cent of the cell, including its DNA, is destroyed, you can almost entirely repair the damage in a single day just by illuminating the cell with the same wavelength at a much weaker intensity. To this day, scientists don't understand this phenomenon, called photorepair, but no one has disputed it.

Popp also knew that patients with xeroderma pigmentosum [right] eventually die of skin cancer because their photorepair system can't repair solar damage. He was also struck by the fact that photorepair works most efficiently at 380 nm -- the same frequency that the cancer-causing compounds react to and scramble.

This was where Popp made his logical leap. If the carcinogens only react to this frequency, it must somehow be linked to photorepair. If so, this would mean that there must be some kind of light in the body responsible for photorepair. A compound must cause cancer because it permanently blocks this light and scrambles it, so photorepair can't work anymore. It seemed logical, but was it true?

Light inside the body

Popp was freaked out by this. He wrote about it in a paper and a prestigious medical journal agreed to publish it.

Not long after that, Popp was approached by a student named Bernhard Ruth, who asked Popp to supervise his work for his doctoral dissertation. Popp told Ruth he was prepared to do so if the student could show that light was emanating from the human body.

This meeting was fortuitous for Popp because Ruth happened to be an excellent experimental physicist. Ruth thought the idea was ridiculous, and immediately set to work building equipment to prove Popp's hypothesis wrong.

Within two years, Ruth had constructed a machine resembling a big X-ray detector which used a photomultiplier to count light, photon by photon. Even today, it is still one of the best pieces of equipment in the field. The machine had to be highly sensitive because it had to measure what Popp assumed would be extremely weak emissions.

In an old documentary film taken in the laboratory at the International Institute of Biophysics, Dr. Popp opens a chamber about the size of a bread box. He places a fresh cutting from a plant and a wooden match in a plastic container inside the dark chamber and closed the light proof door. Immediately he switches on the photomultiplyer and the image shows up on a computer screen. The match stick is black while the green, glowing silhouette of the leaves is clearly visible.

Dr. Popp exclaims, "We now know, today, that man is essentially a being of light."

In 1976, they were ready for their first test with cucumber seedlings. The photomultiplier showed that photons, or light waves, of a surprisingly high intensity were being emitted from the seedlings. In case the light had to do with an effect of photosynthesis, they decided that their next test -- with potatoes -- would be to grow the seedling plants in the dark. This time, when the seedlings were placed in the photomultiplier, they registered an even higher intensity of light. What's more, the photons in the living systems they'd examined were more coherent than anything they'd ever seen.

Popp began thinking about light in nature. Light was present in plants and was used during photosynthesis. When we eat plant foods, he thought, it must be that we take up the photons and store them.

When we consume broccoli, for example, and digest it, it is metabolised into carbon dioxide (CO2) and water, plus the light stored from the sun and photosynthesis. We extract the CO2 and eliminate the water, but the light, an EM wave, must be stored. When taken in by the body, the energy of these photons dissipates and becomes distributed over the entire spectrum of EM frequencies, from the lowest to the highest.

This energy is the driving force for all the molecules in our body. Before any chemical reaction can occur, at least one electron must be activated by a photon with a certain wavelength and enough energy.

The biochemist and Nobel Prize winner Lehninger mentions in his textbook that some reactions in the living cell happen quite a lot faster than what corresponds to 37C temperature. The explanation seems to be that the body purposely directs chemical reactions by means of electromagnetic vibrations (biophotons).

Photons (Light) control everything in the cell

Photons switch on the body's processes like an orchestra conductor bringing each individual instrument into the collective sound. At different frequencies, they perform different functions. Popp found that molecules in the cells responded to certain frequencies, and that a range of vibrations from the photons caused a variety of frequencies in other molecules of the body.

This theory has been supported by Dr. Veljko Veljkovic who now heads the Center for Multidisciplinary Research and Engineering, Institute of Nuclear Sciences Vinca. She dared to ask the question that has forever puzzled cellular biologists: What is it that enabled the tens of thousands of different kinds of molecules in the organism to recognize their specific targets? Living processes depend on selective interactions between particular molecules, and that is true for basic metabolism to the subtlest nuances of emotion. It's like trying to find a friend in a very big very crowded ballroom in the dark.

The conventional picture of a cell even now is that of a bag of molecules dissolved in water. And through bumping into one another by chance -- random collisions -- those molecules that have complementary shapes lock onto to each other so the appropriate biochemical reactions can take place. This 'lock and key' model has been refined to a more flexible (and realistic) 'induced fit' hypothesis that allows each molecule to change shape slightly to fit the other better after they get in touch, but the main idea remains the same.

It is supposed to explain how enzymes can recognize their respective substrates, how antibodies in the immune system can grab onto specific foreign invaders and disarm them. By extension, that's how proteins can 'dock' with different partner proteins, or latch onto specific nucleic acids to control gene expression, or assemble into ribosomes for translating proteins, or other multi-molecular complexes that modify the genetic messages in various ways. But with thousands -- or even hundreds of thousands of reactions happening each second in just one cell this seems pushing the "mechanical" concept a bit too far.

What has been proposed is that somehow each molecule sends out a unique electromagnetic field that can "sense" the field of the complimentary molecule. It's as if there is a "dance" in the cellular medium and the molecules move to the rythm. The music is supplied by the biophoton.

"Veljkovic and Cosic proposed that molecular interactions are electrical in nature, and they take place over distances that are large compared with the size of molecules. Cosic later introduced the idea of dynamic electromagnetic field interactions, that molecules recognize their particular targets and vice versa by electromagnetic resonance. In other words, the molecules send out specific frequencies of electromagnetic waves which not only enable them to 'see' and 'hear' each other, as both photon and phonon modes exist for electromagnetic waves, but also to influence each other at a distance and become ineluctably drawn to each other if vibrating out of phase (in a complementary way)." -- The Real Bioinformatics Revolution: Proteins and Nucleic Acids Singing to One Another? (Paper available at report@i-sis.org.uk)

"There are about 100,000 chemical reactions happening in every cell each second. The chemical reaction can only happen if the molecule which is reacting is excited by a photon... Once the photon has excited a reaction it returns to the field and is available for more reactions... We are swimming in an ocean of light."

These 'biophoton emission', as Popp called them, provided an ideal communication system for the transfer of information to many cells across the organism. But the single most important question remained: where was the light coming from?

A particularly gifted student talked him into another experiment. It is known that when ethidium bromide is applied to samples of DNA, it insinuates itself in between the base pairs of the double helix, causing DNA to unwind. The student suggested that, after applying the chemical, they measure the light coming from the sample. Popp found that the greater the concentration of ethidium, the more the DNA unravelled, but also the stronger the intensity of light. Conversely, the less he used, the less light was emitted.

He also found that DNA could send out a wide range of frequencies, some of which seemed to be linked to certain functions. If DNA stored this light, it would naturally emit more light on being unzipped.

These and other studies proved to Popp that one of the most essential sources of light and biophoton emissions was DNA. DNA was like the master tuning fork of the body. It would strike a particular frequency and certain molecules would follow. It was also possible, he realised, that he had stumbled upon the missing link in current DNA theory that could account for perhaps the greatest miracle of all in human biology -- how a single cell can turn into a fully formed human being.

How cells "talk" to eachother

When you get a cut or scratch on your skin, the cells that are injured somehow signal the surrounding healthy cells to begin reproducing copies of themselves to fill in and mend the opening. When the skin is back to normal, a signal is sent to the cells to tell them to stop reproducing. Scientists have wondered exactly how this works.

With biophoton emissions, Popp believed he had an answer to this question. This phenomenon of coordination and communication could only occur in a holistic system with one central orchestrator. Popp showed in his experiments that these weak light emissions were sufficient to orchestrate the body's repairs. The emissions had to be low intensity because these communications took place on a very small, intracellular, quantum level. Higher intensities would have an effect only in the world of the large and would create too much "noise" to be effective.

The number of photons emitted seemed to be linked to the organism's position on the evolutionary scale -- the more complex the organism, the fewer photons were emitted. Rudimentary animals and plants tended to emit 100 photons/cm2/sec at a wavelength of 200-800 nm, corresponding to a very-high-frequency EM wave well within the visible range, whereas humans emit only 10 photons/cm2/sec at the same frequency.

In one series of studies, Popp had one of his assistants -- a 27-year-old healthy young woman -- sit in the room every day for nine months while he took photon readings of a small area of her hand and forehead. Popp then analysed the data and discovered, to his surprise, that the light emissions followed certain set patterns -- biological rhythms at 7, 14, 32, 80 and 270 days -- and similarities were also noted by day or night, by week and by month, as though the body were following the world's biorhythms as well as its own.

Cancer is a loss of coherent light

So far, Popp had studied only healthy individuals and found an exquisite coherence at the quantum level. But what kind of light is present in those who are ill?

Popp tried out his machine on a series of cancer patients. In every instance, these patients had lost those natural periodic rhythms as well as their coherence. The lines of internal communication were scrambled. They had lost their connection with the world. In effect, their light was going out.

Just the opposite is seen with multiple sclerosis: MS is a state of too much order. Patients with this disease are taking in too much light, thereby inhibiting their cells' ability to do their job. Too much cooperative harmony prevented flexibility and individuality -- like too many soldiers marching in step as they cross a bridge, causing it to collapse. Perfect coherence is an optimal state between chaos and order. With too much cooperation, it is as though individual members of the orchestra are no longer able to improvise. In effect, MS patients are drowning in light.

Popp also examined the effects of stress. In a stressed state, the rate of biophoton emissions goes up -- a defence mechanism designed to restore the patient's equilibrium.

Popp now recognized that what he'd been experimenting with was even more than a cure for cancer or Gestaltbildung. Here was a model which provided a better explanation than the current neo-Darwinist theory for how all living things evolve on the planet. Rather than a system of fortunate but ultimately random error, if DNA uses frequencies of every variety as an information tool, this suggests instead a feedback system of perfect communication through waves that encode and transfer information.

"Good vibes" means coherent light

Popp came to realize that light in the body might even hold the key to health and illness. In one experiment, he compared the light from free-range hens' eggs with that from penned-in, caged hens. The photons in the former were far more coherent than those in the latter.

Popp went on to use biophoton emissions as a tool for measuring the quality of food. The healthiest food had the lowest and most coherent intensity of light. Any disturbance in the system increased the production of photons. Health was a state of perfect subatomic communication, and ill health was a state of communication breakdown. We are ill when our waves are out of synch.

Bio Photon emission detection is currently used commercially in the food industry. Agricultural science is looking at Bio-photon emissions to determine plant health for the purposes of food quality control. Biophotonen is a company working for development and practical applications of biophotonics. The work is based on a variety of patents. "Biophotonen" solves practical problems of food industry, environmental industry, cosmetics, etc.

Off-shoots of Dr. Popp's discovery

In the 1970s Dr. Veljko Veljkovic, who now heads the Center for Multidisciplinary Research and Engineering, Institute of Nuclear Sciences Vinca, also discovered a method for predicting which of the hundreds of new chemicals made by the rapidly expanding chemical industry were carcinogenic, by calculating certain electronic, biophotonic properties of the molecules. This method was soon found equally applicable to predicting organic chemicals that were mutagenic, or toxic, and even those that were antibiotic, or cytostatic (anticancer). Veljkovic's institute in Belgrade has since teamed up with other European laboratories to apply the same method to drug discovery, especially against AIDS disease.

Biophoton Therapy

Biophoton therapy is the application of light to particular areas of the skin for healing purposes. The light, or photons, that are emitted by these units are absorbed by the skin's photoreceptors and then travel through the body's nervous system to the brain, where they help regulate what is referred to as our human bio-energy. By stimulating certain areas of the body with specific quantities of light, biophoton therapy can help reduce pain as well as aid in various healing processes throughout the body.

The theory behind biophoton therapy is based on the work of Dr. Franz Morell and has been expanded by the work of Doctors L.C. Vincent and F.A. Popp, who theorized that light can affect the electromagnetic oscillation, or waves of the body and regulate enzyme activity.

It took some 25 years for Popp to gather converts from among the scientific community. Slowly, a few select scientists around the globe began to consider that the body's communication system might be a complex network of resonance and frequency. Eventually, they would form the International Institute of Biophysics, composed of 15 groups of scientists from international centres around the world.

Popp and his new colleagues went on to study the light emissions from several organisms of the same species, first in an experiment with a type of water flea of the genus Daphnia. What they found was nothing short of astonishing. Tests with a photomultiplier showed that the water fleas were sucking up the light emitted from each other. Popp tried the same experiment on small fish and got the same result. According to his photomultiplier, sunflowers were like biological vacuum cleaners, moving in the direction of the most solar photons to hoover them up. Even bacteria swallowed photons from the media they were put in.

Communication between organisms

Thus, it dawned on Popp that these emissions had a purpose outside of the body. Wave resonance wasn't only being used to communicate inside the body, but between living things as well. Two healthy beings engaged in 'photon sucking', as he called it, by exchanging photons. Popp realised that this exchange might unlock the secret of some of the animal kingdom's most persistent conundrums: how schools of fish or flocks of birds create perfect and instantaneous coordination. Many experiments on the homing ability of animals demonstrate that it has nothing to do with following habitual trails, scents or even the EM fields of the earth, but rather some form of silent communication that acts like an invisible rubber band, even when the animals are separated by miles of distance.

For humans, there was another possibility. If we could take in the photons of other living things, we might also be able to use the information from them to correct our own light if it went awry.

Death Transmission via the Paranormal "Light" Channel

Some extremely interesting experiments were performed by V.P. Kaznacheyev et al regarding the paranormal transmission of death by light inter-organism communication.

Briefly, two groups of cells were selected from the same cell culture and one sample placed on each side of a window joining two environmentally shielded rooms. The cell cultures were in quartz containers. One cell culture was used as the initiation sample and was subjected to a deadly mechanism - virus, germ, chemical poison, irradiation, ultraviolet rays, etc. The second cell culture was observed, to ascertain any transmitted effects from the culture sample being killed.

When the window was made of ordinary glass, the second sample remained alive and healthy. When the window was made of quartz, the second sample sickened and died with the same symptoms as the primary sample.

The experiments were done in darkness, and over 5,000 were reported by Kaznacheyev and his colleagues. The onset of induced complementary sickness and death in the second culture followed a reasonable time -- say two to four hours -- behind sickness and death in the primary culture.

The major transmission difference between window glass and quartz is that quartz transmits both ultraviolet and infrared well, while glass is relatively opaque to ultraviolet and infrared. Both quartz and glass transmit visible light. Thus glass is a suppressor of the paranormal channel, while quartz is not.

In 1950, Western researchers found that cells could be killed in darkness with ultraviolet radiation, kept shielded from visible light for twenty-four hours or longer, and then if radiated with visible light the cells would start reviving by hundreds of thousands even though they had been clinically dead.

Specifically, every cell emits mitogenetic radiation in the ultraviolet range twice: when it is born and when it dies. The UV photon emitted at death contains the exact virtual state pattern of the condition of the cell at death. The healthy cells are bombarded with death messages from those that are dying, and this diffuses the death pattern throughout the healthy culture, eventually kindling into the same death pattern there.

[V.P. Kaznacheyev et al, "Distant Intercellular Interactions in a System of Two Tissue Cultures," Psychoenergetic Systems, Vol. 1, No. 3, March 1976, pp 141-142.]

Popp had begun experimenting with such an idea. If cancer-causing chemicals could alter the body's biophoton emissions, then it might be that other substances could reintroduce better communication. Popp wondered whether certain plant extracts could change the character of the biophoton emissions from cancer cells to make them communicate again with the rest of the body. He began experimenting with a number of non-toxic substances purported to be successful in treating cancer. In all but one instance, these substances only increased the photons from tumour cells, making them even more deadly to the body.

The single success story was mistletoe, which appeared to help the body to 'resocialise' the photon emissions of tumour cells back to normal. In one of numerous cases, Popp came across a woman in her thirties who had breast and vaginal cancer. Popp found a mistletoe remedy that created coherence in her cancer tissue samples. With the agreement of her doctor, the woman stopped any treatment other than the mistletoe extract and, after a year, all her laboratory tests were virtually back to normal.

To Popp, homoeopathy was another example of photon sucking. He had begun to think of it as a 'resonance absorber'. Homoeopathy rests upon the notion that like is treated with like. A plant extract that at full strength can cause hives in the body is used in an extremely diluted form to get rid of it. If a rogue frequency in the body can produce certain symptoms, it follows that a high dilution of a substance which can produce the same symptoms would also carry that frequency. Like a resonating tuning fork, a suitable homoeopathic solution might attract and then absorb the abnormal oscillations, allowing the body to return to normal health.

Popp thought that electro-magnetic molecular signalling might even explain acupuncture. According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, the human body has a system of meridians, running deep in the tissues, through which flows an invisible energy the Chinese call ch'i, or the life force. The ch'i supposedly enters the body through these acupuncture points and flows to deeper organ structures (which do not correspond to those in Western biology), providing energy (or the life force). Illness occurs when this energy is blocked at any point along the pathways. According to Popp, the meridian system transmits specific energy waves to specific zones of the body.

Research has shown that many of the acupuncture points have a dramatically reduced electrical resistance compared with the surrounding skin (10 kilo-ohms and 3 mega-ohms, respectively). Orthopaedic surgeon Dr Robert Becker, who has done a great deal of research on EM fields in the body, designed a special electrode recording device that rolls along the body like a pizza cutter. His many studies have shown electrical charges on every one of the people tested corresponding to the Chinese meridian points.

[Extracted from The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe, by Lynne McTaggart]

Light in human consciousness

I mention this latest work for those who may wish to explore the boundaries of photon research and theory. In a ground-breaking paper with the lengthy title of "Orchestrated Objective Reduction of Quantum Coherence in Brain Microtubules: The 'Orch OR' Model for Consciousness" by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose, the brain is described as a quantum computer whose main architecture are the cytoskeletal microtubules and other structures within each of the brain's neurons.

If you examine a neuron, you will see that there are many hollow tubes surrounding the axon. These microtubules have been thought of as a kind of scaffold to support the nerve fiber. But they are now getting a second look as the possible architecture of our consciousness.

The particular characteristics of microtubules that make them suitable for quantum effects include their crystal-like lattice structure, hollow inner core, organization of cell function and capacity for information processing. According to the researchers, their size appears perfectly designed to transmit photons in the UV range.

[Above:] Schematic of central region of neuron (distal axon and dendrites not shown), showing parallel arrayed microtubules interconnected by MAPs. Microtubules in axons are lengthy and continuous, whereas in dendrites they are interrupted and of mixed polarity. Linking proteins connect microtubules to membrane proteins including receptors on dendritic spines.

"Traditionally viewed as the cell's 'bone-like' scaffolding, microtubules and other cytoskeletal structures now appear to fill communicative and information processing roles. Theoretical models suggest how conformational states of tubulins within microtubule lattices can interact with neighboring tubulins to represent, propagate and process information as in molecular-level 'cellular automata' computing systems." -- Hameroff and Watt, 1982; Rasmussen et al, 1990; Hameroff et al, 1992

In their paper, Hameroff and Penrose present a model linking microtubules to consciousness using quantum theory. In their model, quantum coherence emerges, and is isolated in brain microtubules until a threshold related to quantum gravity is reached. The resultant self-collapse creates an instantaneous "now" event. Sequences of such events create a flow of time, and consciousness.

Don't worry if you can't understand this. It's heavy reading but it does show that the existence of internal photons -- inner light -- is very real and is the basis of virtually all human cellular and systemic function.

Could the Russian scientists really have changed a salamander embryo into a frog with lasers? I prefer to wait until the actual details of the experiment are published and reviewed -- but I am much less apt to dismiss this as fiction now that I know about our inner lights.
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Comments:

Anyone interested in an in depth analysis of this sort of phenomenon (electromagnetic/quantum coherence) as it relates to life should check out:

"The Rainbow and the Worm" by Mae-Wan Ho.

There are a number of reviews at Amazon.com.

It elaborates on some of the same ideas covered in this article at a fundamental level. This really bridges the gap between "hard science" i.e. contemporary physics and what many professional scientists would consider "new age psycho-babble".

It would appear that the qualitative truths of a more ancient world view, which due to their often nebulous and poorly defined nature, have previously defied objective analysis and experimental verification are now getting the solid foundation they need to really make sense.

The ability to quantify these phenomena within a framework of physics that can lead to specific repeatable prediction of results at a basic level will greatly accelerate the discovery of the underlying principles and lead to practical applications, medical and otherwise.

At the same time the quantitative truths of the current scientific world view, which due to their often brittle and rigidly specified nature, have previously defied attempts to reconcile "known facts" about "animate" matter with "known facts" about "inanimate" matter are now getting the infusion of new concepts they need to really deal with the unity of seemingly differing aspects of reality.

Oh, and I hate to mention it but this knowledge will, of course, be weaponized. If it can heal organisms it can kill them. You can expect to see funding move in that direction as soon as the practical aspects mentioned above start to show promise.

John B.

According to the article the food radiation should make it unhealthy. FDA made it mandatory now.

Yurily

This ground breaking work may be cure for paralyzed people due to injury. Damage done at cellular level stopping photon flow through damaged cells. Hence not letting cells communicate. Possible use of a quartz based fluid injected into damaged area letting cells repair themselves. Letting photons flow through spine reconnecting communication between nerve cells alleviating blocked flow and restoring mobility, or nerve interaction across damaged area restoring health. This is very important work it has far reaching implications. Many mental disorders could possibly be helped with light therapy. Possible Alzheimer cure due to lack of photon transmission caused by blocked flow from environment or food or drug interaction. Makes me think standard glass windows should be replaced with quartz based glass. Could help depression brought on by low light in winter in the northern hemisphere. Simply astonishing work. Interested readers might want to read Lynne McTaggart Author of THE Field and The Intention Experiment

Great article.

Thanks Daniel