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Morphology and self-organising systems
© di Claudio Cardella
Dipartimento di Meccanica e Aeronautica. Univ. “La Sapienza”, Roma, Italia.
Invited paper to the joint ISAGA-CAO Conference The Challenge of Change -
Learning to cope with (self)organising systems. Palma de Mallorca, Spain,
july 11-13, 1995.
 Any
living organism is a typical example of self-organising system. Presently
there is no viable description of life in Physics or in Chemistry. Actually
there is none, since these doctrines do not consider themselves as directly
involved with life; nevertheless Biophysics and Biochemistry claim their
sound scientific status. Instead, from a natural philosopher’s standpoint a
living being is defined as one that is able to preserve its form. But again
we lack any operative idea of form. If we were able to define suitably the
individual form through some ob-servable effects, we might throw the
foundations the of a new scientific vision. The premises of such a
morphological approach once existed in the ancient natural philosophy, but
have been disregarded by the poste-rior theoretical developments. We can try
to retrace those ideas and eventually readapt them to our present scientific
needs. They arise from a more mature reflection on the elementary quantum of
action role. This awareness finally emphasised the more significant
conceptual discrepancies still existing and not yet solved in the frame of
Physics. Presently there are many hints indicating the existence of some
kind of energy associated with the form, but our standard scientific tools
do not seem suitable to reveal it. Therefore experimental evidence should be
reached through new and specifically devised tests.
1. Introduction
A (bio)physicist or a (bio)chemist asked to define a living
organism, would probably describe it as a remarkably complex self-organised
system that is able to transform the gross external substances used as food,
into very ordered internal structures. After that, they would have some problems
in going further into the analysis because the Second Law of Thermodynamics
correctly applies only to closed systems, wether any living being is a
well-known example of open system. As a result, we would not be able to get at
once, from their intricate physical-chemical description, the ultimate reason
for which a dog is different from a monkey.
If we instead asked a natural philosopher to tell us about a
self-organising system, he would probably outline it as a system that is able to
preserve its form and to repair the accidental damages it undergoes. Any living
organism represents in fact a typical example of self-organising system, at
least from a philosophical point of view. Even on a purely etymological
standpoint the word organism recalls the idea of an autonomous organisation. In
this order of ideas, the individual’s death occurs when its material body is not
able to abide any more its specific form. In that case, the material support of
the expired form, as soon as it is left vacant, is taken over by some other and
less specific form. Therefore we could think life as being the struggle of the
individual organism to preserve its own form and to defend it against all
injuries that are caused primarily by matter or energy exchanges through its own
environment. We identify these injures with various names according to their
origins, which may be anger, illness, weather or conflicts against other
individuals. In any case all these factors sum up to some specific kinds of
interactions that take place in the organism internal environment and through
its immediately external environment. The very same considerations hold for
self-organising systems.
More than fifty years ago W. Thomson d’Arcy in a pioneering
work of his (Accroissement et forme), applied mathematical and geometrical
analysis to morphology in investigating the relationship between form and
mechanical efficiency. His transformations’ theory had the purpose of
establishing the existence of geometrical ratios among the forms of the animal
species that could be reasonably regarded as related neighbours from a
zoological standpoint. He reached the conclusion that the comparison of the
permutations, if correctly referred to the most adequate original type, could be
accurately described making use of an elementary application of the coordinate
method.
F. Pannaria [ ] noticed that the conception of a “biological
field”, to which some biologists give a purely symbolic meaning, while others
conceive it as a factor responsible for morphogenetic activities, relates
closely to Thomson d’Arcy transformations’ theory. We can trace the origin of
this theory as far back as the sixteenth century, and more specifically in the
works of some naturalists such as G. A. Borrelli (De Motu Animalium, Roma 1680),
the founder of the iatromathematic school, and as Marcus Marci of Kronland,
Boemia (Idearum Operatricium Idea, 1635).
The Theory of Forms (Gestalt-Theorie, Wertheimer, Köhler,
Koffka and others), first emerged in the psychological domain and later on was
associated with the critical analysis of science. Nowadays the theory of forms
seems to gain a broader validity in biology as well as in physics. This
doctrine, that has been re-established by Köhler [ ], asserts that in the growth
of living subjects there is a factor, different for each specie, that rules the
functions and the motions of all the parts and leads the individuals up to a
certain development degree, but not any further. This degree is different
according to each specie.
The same ideas could apply, within the so-called lifeless (or
inorganic) world, to the crystals’ origin and growth, if such a biological
formulation had a sound theoretical basis. Therefore we need a physical “floor”
as a starting point where to prove from that the quality and the behaviour of a
“whole” (or of a structured individual), are not equivalent to the sum of its
component particles’ qualities and behaviours. In this perspective, the overall
characteristics would be some new “expressions” appearing, somehow
instantaneously, as a result of given conditions.
Some experimental evidence of these ideas seems today available, although the
limited number of the observed test cases does not yet allow the researchers to
draw steady conclusions. Nevertheless these preliminary results seem to be
useful indications of the existence of morphologically active physical factors.
We shall briefly expose the experimental procedures and the results at the end
of this work.
The aim of this study is to investigate on a historical
ground the departure of physics from natural philosophy, to relieve some of the
actual theoretical inconsistencies and finally to throw the bases of a
morphological approach to the investigation of natural processes.
2. A brief historical survey
Pannaria, in the above mentioned paper, presents an excellent
historic and philosophical survey of the idea of physical becoming. His analysis
shows how the problem of physical change, which so closely connects to the
definition of the phenomenon, or physical event, has hardly received any
attention after the development of classical mechanics. This is certainly true,
but at the same time we should be well aware that the fathers of the new
doctrine had no guilt for such a negligence. We want to discuss in some detail
this subject, since it seems important to explain the subsequent evolution up to
the actual physical paradigm, especially in consideration of its many logical
inconsistencies. In a final analysis, most of them apparently stem, as we shall
see further on, from a theoretically incorrect comprehension of Planck’s
elementary quantum of action.
Let’s see then where we should place the departure point of
physics from natural philosophy according to Pannaria’s analysis.
The question of how the physical world becomes fell in the
oblivion when the renewal that had been started by Galilei, Decartes and Bacon
at the dawn of mathematical physics, supplanted Aristotelian physics through the
advantageous introduction of the quantity, or the ens quantum. So the
mathematical physics, which in an early time had replaced Aristotelian physics,
after Newton proscribed by principle every philosophy.
Nevertheless, if we carefully read the preface to the first
edition of the Principia (written in “Cambridge, Trinity College, the 8 of may
1686”), we come to the conclusion that Newton’s original thought has been
severely misunderstood. This assertion finds a further support in a comparison
of the beginning and the ending of that preface with the closing of the book.
Since the Ancients (according to Pappus) had the mechanics in
the greatest consideration to investigate the facts of nature, and the Moderns,
having overlooked the substantial forms and the occult qualities, attempted to
submit the natural phenomena to mathematical laws, in this treatise I have
particularly deepened the connections of mathematics with natural philosophy.
Would the heaven like that we were allowed to deduce all other natural phenomena
from the laws of mechanics through the same kind of argumentation.
Many things make me suspect that all of them could depend on
certain forces by the effects of which the bodies’ particles, due to not yet
known causes, either hit each other and connect according to regular shapes,
either reject and depart one from the other. In vain up to now the philosophers
have investigated the nature of these still unknown forces.
It would be licit now to add something about the subtilest spirit that pervades
the gross bodies and hides in them; through the actions of which the bodies’
particles attract each other at the smallest distances and once they had become
contiguous, they adhere closely; the electrical bodies act at larger distances,
either rejecting or attracting the near by corpuscles; light is emitted,
reflected, refracted, inflected and heats the bodies; the whole sensation is
excited and the limbs of the animals move accordingly at will. The [sensation]
propagates, for the vibrations of this spirit and through the solid threads of
the nerves, from the external organs and from the brain, to the muscles. But
these things cannot be explained in few words; moreover there is not enough
abundance of experiments, through which the actions’ laws of this spirit could
be accurately determined and shown [ ].
Newton’s works did not receive immediately a widespread
consensus and were considered by some learned men as a tedious. This, at least
seems to be Jonathan Swift’s advice: “This polite word [banter] ... fell among
the footmen, and then at last retired to the pedants, by whom is applied as
properly to the production of wit as if I should apply it to Sir Isaac Newton’s
mathematics”[ ].
Newton was the closest of Boyle’s disciples (and his
testamentary executor, together with the philosopher Locke), and thoroughly
shared his Aristotelian views. According to which all the bodies are made of the
same and only common, catholic, and homogeneous matter. They differ from each
other by the form, the dimensions and the motions of the composing particles,
that anyway are produced by the “universal matter” [ ]. As Newton noted, in a
couple of drafts of the Principia’s Conclusio: “The matter of all things is one
and unique, that is transmuted in countless forms by the natural operations”. In
a still different version of the same Conclusio, he reproduced Boyle’s
hypothesis on the bodies’ variety as derived from the particles’ combinations,
with the only difference that he brought in the forces of attraction to account
for the bodies’ densities [ ].
On the escort of the preceding considerations we can attempt
to pin down the general frame of Newton’s physical comprehension. This will be
useful for a double reason: to get an insight of the late seventeenth century’s
way of rationalising the perception of nature, and to explore the origins of the
shift toward the actual physical thought. At least the premises of such a deep
transformation appear undeniably localised in that historical period.
Newton, as well as his learned contemporaries, believed in
the Aristotelian natural scheme called ilemorphism, (from the Greek Hylé =
undifferentiated matter, + morfos = form). At the base of this doctrine there
was the assumption of a universal matter permeating the entire physical space.
This ubiquitous substance being utterly passive, it must be acted upon to become
the bodies’ condensed and physically observable matter. Recalling that the
Ancients named spirit any physically active cause, we can easily justify Newton
for invoking, at the very end of Principia the “subtlest spirit that pervades
the gross bodies and hides in them”. Then, according to Newton, this agent must
be somehow related to the form of the body, since right afterward he makes it is
responsible for the global cohesion of the body’s composing particles.
3. Matter, mass and quantum
“Since ... the Moderns, having overlooked the substantial
forms and the occult qualities, have attempted to submit the natural phenomena
to mathematical laws, in this treatise I have particularly deepened the
connections of mathematics with natural philosophy”. How should we interpret
this declaration of intents? Does he assume he can do without the substantial
forms and the occult qualities, or rather he aims to fill up the vacancy due to
their under valuation? We know that Newton delayed for twenty years the
publication of the work destined to change the vision of the world: therefore he
had plenty of time to think it over and to scrupulously weight each word. On the
contrary, we do not know anything about the hidden expectations that drove him
to compose it.
For sure he was the first person to be dismayed before the
results he had reached. A great perplexity is the undertone of the famous three
words Hypotheses non fingo he selected to proclaim both his scientific honesty
and the inadequacy to cope with the consequences of the gravitation theory that
he had so brilliantly established. As he wrote in a letter to abbot Richard
Bentley, he regarded as an absurdity the idea that a body could act upon another
one at distance through the vacuum, without the mediation of any material means
[ ].
This assertion proves that Newton could not at least do
without the bodies’ occult qualities, since ultimately he was forced to
acknowledge gravitation as being one of them. On the other end, we thoroughly
agree with B. J. Teeter Dobbs epilogue according to which, Newton, all his life
long was concerned with the enigma represented by the transmutation of the
multiple forms of the universal matter [ ].
It still remains one open question: who were the “Moderns”
that Newton mentioned the preface of the Principia? Among them very likely he
placed the great investigators of the bodies’ motion such as Copernicus and
Galilei who really had overlooked the problem of substantial forms in their
studies.
Not much has changed in this regard since Newton’s time: the
origin of the feeblest of attractive forces, the gravitational one, is still as
unknown as that of the strongest of them, the nuclear cohesion; the substantial
forms remain banned from any physics’ dictionary; the matter has been bluntly
replaced by the mass, although since its birth the latter was defined as being a
measure of the foster.
We finally approached our main issue’s core: we are looking for a viable
relationship between natural philosophy and mathematics, to express it with
Newton’s words.
The pivot around which any mathematics rotates is the ens
quantum, or the “quantity of being”, or the “measure of the essence”. This
quantity does not pertain to the matter, but to the substantial form. This one
bears a very tight relationship with the idea, since only the idea has an effect
on the substance (from the Latin: substare, to stay underneath) and is able to
modify it. Such a modification becomes concrete through the quantum, identified
by the number. We find here the deepest root of the physical change: the number
constitutes the connection of the matter with the form, and it establishes the
unbreakable tie that makes them inseparable.
Then the number’s action takes place in the between of physics and metaphysics,
since the number summarises the activity of the form on the matter. In other
words it signifies all matter’s qualities that are occult, or hidden, by
definition. Therefore the number’s permanence implies the form’s permanence, and
consequently the invariance of the body’s material constitution. This is the
most inclusive significance of quantum numbers which, up to now have been used
and thought about only for relatively trivial purposes.
The experience confirms that body’s form does not change
during its motion under the classical physics’ conditions. There must be then a
number, a quantity that remains unchanged: which is this quantity? It is the
mass number, that is the quantity of matter. Whence Newton’s well-known
definition, which much too lightly is held as being a tautology. Rather, the
mass declares, through the number, the “ens quantum”, the permanence of the
body’s constituent matter, and only as far as its volume and density are
concerned with and related to the body’s site, which instead changes during the
motion. The individuation of mass as being the formal invariant of motion, that
is the matter permanence, has not been a Newton’s insignificant achievement.
The Impulse Theorem tells us that the body’s mass certainly
affects the body’s motion, but how? If the quantity of matter, which supports
the body’s formal determination, does not vary during the motion, then the mass
number has no connection with the body’s spatial configuration. Consequently
that number has no influence on the location, if this is meant in the sense of
the site, or the material receptacle, but only on the change of site in time,
that is the body’s relative and instantaneous position. That is the reason for
the mass has no other dimension than that proceeding from its own definition and
stands by itself in the unit system. For the same reason the we can reduce a
moving body to a point with no extent and no spatial dimensions. On the
contrary, the very same argument does not allow us to logically deduce the mass
from any geometrical property of the space-time continuum, as the General
Relativity Theory claims. We cannot either reasonably retain the mass
responsible for a non-local action such as the gravitational force. Therefore
space-time modifications as well as the gravitational field should be more
correctly ascribed to the matter’s properties.
4. Some problems of Mathematical Physics
As we have already remarked, the ingress on the physical
scene of Planck’s elementary quantum of action led to some severe logical
discrepancies. Their most relevant consequence was the loss of causality decreed
by Heisenberg’s Indetermination Principles. The overused argument so often
adopted to minimise the damage, that such a loss applies only to tiny regions of
the space-time continuum, does not hold on a sound logical ground, because
determinism pertains to the whole physical paradigm and it can not be negotiated
on a single item.
The experimental evidence of physical events realistically
complying to mathematical laws indicates that the bodies get into relation with
each other through their properties and they do it in the same way as numbers
do. On the other side, this equal behaviour’s assumption ratifies the quantum
mechanics’ logical foundations. Anyway we have to make here a sharp distinction
between the bodies themselves and their properties: a given mass, for instance,
is not a body, but a body’s property, which has sense only until the body itself
exists. Therefore a body with zero mass has no sense. Then each body must have
an ens quantum, referred to a morphological unit that requires an a priori
definition. This means that we have to identify the body’s minimum morphological
requirement before any posterior quantity that can be expressed and measured by
the body’s properties. For instance, which is the upper or the lower limit of
existence for a molecule? Avogadro’s Law helps to answer the second part of this
question, but are we really sure that two or three atoms of the same chemical
element form a real molecule? Or another: what makes the difference between a
vegetable and an animal cell? Only after we have identified the morphological
unit of a given body we can go on to establish and order its really fundamental
properties. As a consequence, no transition from a given property to a different
one is logically allowed. In other words and for instance, mass could not
transform itself, as such, into energy, because energy, about mass is a
posterior physical entity and therefore the body’s ens quantum, or rather its
persistence would forbid it.
Everything, in mathematics, depends upon the unit, and
without the unit figure no mathematics is possible. Therefore if we want to
consider physical phenomena under a mathematical aspect, we previously have to
frame them into morphological categories, and then define for each one of them
the “unit phenomenon”.
After that, we may ask ourselves about the minimum number of
features we need to describe the behaviour of the simplest natural bodies. When
we will have made our choice, we shall assign to the selected items the name of
elementary properties, or the simpler one of elements.
If we accept the existence of a discontinuous physical world
we cannot refuse the existence of a continuum background endowed with
antithetically physical properties. Our reason indicates us that if the
discontinuity is material, then the continuity cannot be non material. The term
non material is the negation of material, and not its antithetical opposite. The
matter is not the daughter of a non material father; the combined matter comes
from the uncombined matter: therefore the two antithetical terms are the
combined and the uncombined and their common reference, the matter, cannot be
opposed to itself. In this way we can get an image of a physical continuum
endowed with a different physicality than the one of our discontinuum. Such a
different physicality is the backstage and the origin of our physical scene [ ].
Our considerations follow F. Pannaria’s views, which were
based upon F. Severi’s hypothesis of the existence of a sub-quantum continuous
and homogeneous medium that he called pure matter [ ]. It is a constituent
continuum with the fundamental property of producing the primary discontinuous
physical entities (that is, the truly elementary particles) through a suitable
change of state where the quantum numbers of each elementary particle are
generated. To visualise this process we might roughly compare it to the
emergence of discrete ice particles that instantaneously lump from a continuous
sea of pure matter. F. Pannaria defined as elements the matter, the mass, the
energy and the field [ ], as they seemed the most convenient physical properties
to build with a satisfactory description of natural processes. Recently the
Author and F. Pannaria (1898-1994) showed how theoretically fertile this option
can be [ ].
Anyhow, as soon as we have chosen a certain set of elements,
then a correspondence remains immediately established among the ens quanta of
each element. Thus for instance the mass unit that we have associated to the
“unit phenomenon” will fix, once for all, a definite numerical equivalence to
the corresponding units of matter, energy and field, so that any other body’s
physical behaviour will be thoroughly described by the complete set of its
elementary quantum numbers. The matter quantum number, as we have seen,
associates with the substantial form of the body, and hence we can assume it as
its morphological index in the sense that if the matter quantum number varies,
the body’s individuality changes too.
5. Morphology, causality and physical change
What we have here introduced as form, should be correctly
meant as the active principle determining the body’s structure and physical
properties.
We have shown elsewhere [ ] that the boundary line between
the organic and the inorganic world fades away when we investigate the bodies’
physical behaviour from a functional point of view. At a functional level all
the bodies behave in the same way and exhibit the same fundamental functions
that are the energy exchange with the environment, the transformation of the
accepted energy value into a new one and the release in the environment of the
new form of energy. These functions can be regarded as the basic means that any
body has to use to preserve its individuality, and therefore its form. With no
exception, the “field” of the massive matter is the medium of the energy
acceptance, change and release.
Under this premise we can now include self-organising systems
into the broader category of organic systems. Even an atom strives to maintain
its form: any ionised atom seeks the first occasion to revert to its previous
neutral state, that is to its primitive form, by conquering back the lost
electron.
The periodic table of the elements is a very good example of
the ideas that we exposed in the previous section. If we look at the periodic
table from a morphological standpoint, we notice that the members of the
chemical elements’ society can be grouped in families, in relatives, in
inhabitants of the same house (isotopes). To begin with, that club is very
exclusive. No more than 92 naturally recurring members are allowed in; for none,
so far, has given conclusive evidence of the natural presence on Earth of
heavier elements. Then each member is unmistakably identified by its membership
card numbers. Firstly we recognise every individual form by the its protons’
number, which signifies its ens quantum, and then by the neutrons’ number, which
somehow is an index of the form’s “vitality”. In fact we verify that if an
element has a higher number of stable isotopes than another one, that same
element generally exhibits also a greater physical and chemical activity.
The form is energy. Then the number expressing the form is
magic because we do not have yet quite understood how it works. Nevertheless we
have a solid evidence that nuclei characterised by certain protons’ and/or
neutrons’ numbers behave peculiarly, as for instance they exhibit a special
stability. This happens for the well-known magic numbers 2, 8, 14, 20, 50 and
82. Are they perhaps the language that the Nature at work uses to make herself
understandable? It might be worth recalling here that these numbers, their
halves or their doubles, ever since the dawn of civilisation and under every
sky, have been revered as sacred.
A logical analysis of the Second Law of Thermodynamics brings
up the conclusion that natural processes develop themselves in one direction
only and that with each of them the world goes one step ahead leaving behind
indelible footprints.
What happens then when we formulate a thought? An idea is
always associated to a non material image, or rather to a mental form. Is the
conception of a mental form a natural process? It is quite hard to deny it,
because every man unquestionably thinks, and it would be tantamount to ostracise
all mankind from the vast adobe of nature. Then every thought’s trace indelibly
remains; but where, and how are the records stored?
The process of memory seems to confirm our conjecture. The
idea becomes a remembrance, which is the somehow persisting trace of an idea,
since it can be “evoked”. Nevertheless that trace does seem to remain unchanged.
The evocation always proposes a slightly different scene, where some details
fade away and others are enhanced, at times with augmentation, at times with
loss of significance. Which type of physical work is involved with this process?
And most important, to the expenses of which energy is that work done? We could
roughly compare remembrance to a hologram where some tiny sections are lacking
or are deteriorated, and others are pasted in. These alterations do not
significantly modify the overall view because the main information is spread
through the whole bulk region of the “negative film” and therefore only the
image definition and some details are affected.
As it happens with mental images, the holographic image
support is almost non material, since the figure looks as if it was standing
alone in the air. We know that the holographic image is produced by the
resonance and the interference patterns of two beams of coherent light, one of
which goes through the “negative film”. If the film is altered, or if one or
both the beams are disturbed by an extraneous light source, the image is
consequently modified.
If our comparison had some resemblance with reality,
something alike could happen to the ideas. Then these, as well as the forms,
(recalling that in the ancient Greek the word idea meant type, mould), could be
stored as non-local alterations of the pure matter continuum. There, they could
also interfere with each other, thus giving rise, under the action of Planck’s
quanta, to the whole variety of the modified patterns that we observe in the
combined matter. As far as the mental images are concerned, our brain would be
nothing else than a tool, a personal form detector subject to age and to
mismanagement.
Of course these considerations are by far more of a
metaphysical, than of a physical nature. Nevertheless we should well keep in
mind how deeply the appearance of the quantum of action has affected the
physical paradigm. Before that time the physical vision relied upon the
hypothesis of the continuity of all causal relationships. Instead, after the
advent of the “age of discontinuity”, with the atomic nature of energy that
reflects itself into the atomic nature of the bodies, if we cannot exclude or
deny the “causality”, at least we have to place it “out” of our physical world.
Pannaria wrote: “In our physical world every phenomenon, that is what happens
and becomes, is an effect of an effect. Therefore we experiment and define the
effects of the effects: we have to look for the cause of each effect, that is
any cause of each effect, in the underground of each phenomenon, whether we have
to search a clue of each cause for any effect in the physical backstage of our
physical world.”
“Both ‘exchange’ and ‘interaction’ energies rely on the
cause-and-effect relationship, and they are located in between our physical
world’s stage and backstage, this one being the observable phenomena’s
underground basement. Each effect is such when our stage world’s matter or
energy is taken over by a backstage or underground cause, which gives it a
physically determination as far as the qualities and the quantities are
concerned. Each effect is not such any more when its cause leaves the matter or
the energy that it had previously taken over. A similar ‘exchange mechanics’,
that is a mechanics of the physical becoming, can be envisaged in the
‘materialisation processes of radiant energy’, in the opposite ‘processes of
particles’ dematerialization’ and in Dirac’s ‘holes’. ” (see ref. [1]).
In this mechanism of the matter or energy ‘exchanges’ that
take place between the “stage” and the ‘backstage’, of our physical world, we
find the deepest meaning of the ‘quantum of action’.
6. Conclusion
Up to now our comprehension of knowledge does not go any
further than this: what disappear, always appears back with new properties (the
expressions of a different essence), and after the experience we search for a
weight equivalence between what we have obtained and what there was before.
We also remark that two interacting bodies mutually exchange
matter or energy through an action depending on a certain affinity that exists
between them. A body that emits energy under the action (exchange) of some other
body’s energies initially expresses a motion and then, when it reaches the limit
of its possibilities of motion, it tends to lose gradually its constitutional
unity, or its energy (or interaction) wholeness, until it finally resolves and
dissolves its own bounded energy storage.
We know that it is such a bounded energy storage to keep the
body together, but how does it globally act upon the matter? We know that a
certain energy is the constituent of discontinuous matter, but again, how is it
bound to the discontinuous phase of that unique and homogeneous universal
matter? Only the matter that is combined through the four already mentioned
elements in what we call a physical body is a bounded energy storage. The
ubiquitous and timeless background of the physical becoming is not a bounded
energy storage. Even if it was one, certainly it could not be a bounded one,
otherwise it would lose its homogeneity. Therefore we are left with the only
choice that such a bounded energy storage comes into being simultaneously with
the body generation by the pure matter.
Out of the body, between the bodies, there is no energy, but
only “action”, which is defined as “energy transfer”. The postman, he who
delivers or transfers a letter is much more than the letter itself. He is
active, while the letter is passive: without the postman a letter has no sense,
because a written piece of paper becomes a letter only when it is correctly
delivered, that is, when its transfer has been successful. Therefore it is the
postman that justifies the letter existence, and not vice versa. Therefore the
energy is such only after it has been “exchanged”, once has reached its
destination. What physical entity acts as the energy postman? The field: because
there is always one field responsible of each kind of energy transfer.
This goes on in our physical world, among the physical bodies; but what happens
when a body, or rather a particle, is generated by the background and
immediately becomes a bounded energy storage?
In two hundred and fifty years we do not seem to have gone
much ahead of Newton’s “subtilest spirit that pervades the gross bodies and
hides in them ...”
There are many explanations for this delay: maybe for a too
long time we have been more concerned with building up a remarkable technology
than sound theoretical bases; maybe until now we have not been able to conceive
the underlying unity of all the phenomena, including life, other than in a
strictly philosophic domain.
The development of a morphological approach to natural
processes could result a powerful tool to build a bridge between the physical
and the biological world
The most outstanding feature of the living organisms is their
capacity to react as a whole to external actions. They behave as indivisible
entities that have not parts and therefore they are not composed. Blaise Pascal
long time ago proved by a solid reasoning that an indibisible reality is bound
to have no extension. Nevertheless we perceive all the living organisms through
their physical bodies that, without exception, have parts and are composed. This
means that life plunges its roots into the continuous and homogeneous background
of our physical world. It also implies the existence of some “biological
fields”, which we discussed in a previous work (see ref. [13]).
Large crystals also behave as individuals and in certain
conditions can react to very thin external influences: their radio-waves
detecting properties are well-known. Supposing that biological fields might be
of a magnetic nature, we did the following very simple experience. A sealed
glass vial containing 10 ml. of sterile distilled water was “magnetised”; simply
by holding it in the hands for a certain time. Then the vial was opened and a
saturated solution of a copper salt was made with that water. Finally the
solution was poured into a Petri dish and was left drying at room temperature.
An identical procedure was followed to obtain the reference case for “untreated”
water. The same experience was repeated three times in different crystallisation
conditions. Every time the crystallisation pattern in the reference dish showed
a sensibly greater number of crystallisation centers than the one obtained with
“treated water” (see the figure below: at right the crystallisation obtained
from the “untreated” water solution).
Aknowledgement
The author thanks Prof. P. R. S. Sansevero for his benevolent
attention throughout the development of this work.
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