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Qualtum cosmics-and-chaotics--the ultimate tortoise in physics and modern medicine. MV Kothari, LA MehtaDepartment of Anatomy, Seth G.S. Medical College, Mumbai.
Correspondence Address: Source of Support: None, Conflict of Interest: None PMID: 0010740733
Qualtum cosmics is the qualitative opposite of quantum mechanics. The flip-side of qualtum cosmics is qualtum chaotics, the two governing much of what is seen as inscrutable in medicine. The Ultimate (Last) Tortoise is close to Einsteinean idea of a Unified Theory, a single concept that can explain whatsoever there is in physics, (and in medicine, or what have you). Keywords: Human, Nonlinear Dynamics, Philosophy, Medical, Quantum Theory,
March 14, 1979 marked the birth centenary of Einstein - in the words of Haldane, “the greatest Jew after Jesus Christ.” As a timely tribute to him, we discussed the roles that Time, Uncertainty, Relativity, and Normality (TURN), hitherto in the realm of physics, played in the arena of modern medicine. The TURN concept[1] spawned and sustained “The trans-science aspects of disease and death”[2]. This was followed by “The trans-technique aspects of disease and death” based on SUCHness. - Systemicity, Uniqueness, Cellularity, and Herdity. The TURN and SUCH concepts have stood the test of time to drive home the essential impotency of modern medicine on problems ranging from common cold to coronary or cancer. Much as the term mechanic has turned into a discipline mechanics, so does cosmic becomes cosmics and chaotic becomes chaotics.., the two implying the science of order (cosmos) and disorder (chaos) as rules modern medicine. The appellation modern has been retained to drive home the point that no matter how “advanced” the science of medicine, it must obey some ordinary self-evident laws. Quantum mechanics, is “a mathematical physical theory that grew out of Planck’s quantum theory and deals with the mechanics of atomic and related systems in terms of quantities that can be measured”[3]. Qualtum Cosmics-and-Chaotics is a way of comprehending the cosmic and (seemingly) chaotic mechanisms that impart a qualitative individuality to an atom, a cell, a cancer cell, or a fingerprint. The unprecedented, unparalleled, and unrepeatable uniqueness/individuation that a medical phenomenon exhibits is no will o’ the wisp but a predictable outcome of powers cosmic-et-chaotic. The parable of The Ultimate Tortoise/Turtle (TUT) is worthy of note. In an Indian purana, a child asks : “On what does the world rest?” “On the elephant named Mahapadma.” “On what does Mahapadma rest?” “On a tortoise called Chakwa.” The answerer thought he had finished with the child : “On what does Chakwa rest?” “On the next tortoise.” “Which is The Ultimate Tortoise?” “No one knows.” Einstein spent his lifetime on a Unified Field Theory,[4] a concept to explain all other concepts, a concept that is ultra qua non, beyond-which-not. This essay is an attempt at portraying TUT, a conceptology that must satisfy a physicist as much as a physician, valid as much in medicine as in physics. (The Mahapadma-Chakwa theme is best seen in a South Indian temple, the duo flanking the steps to the temple.) TUT : The Ultimate Tortoise Theory, theorem, theatre are rooted in Greek and Latin theorein meaning to look at, behold, contemplate, or consider. Put simply, it is a way of looking at anything, with the seeing eye of the inner mind. TUT is a way of arriving at the final substratum of whatever that there is. In Vedic parlance, TUT is the addhisthana, the base/ground/foundation on which the noumenal/phenomenal universe is superimposed and is called addhyaas. TUT, one day, may be held synonymous with GUT – Grand Unified Theory. The Hindus dreamt that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough to support an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are the sublimest recreation of the intellect. HENRY DAVID THOREAU[5] Walking The choice of a tortoise is a thoughtful one : The tortoise is “slow but sure”[6] longest-lived among all vertebrates including man, the longest-lived mammal, its shell can support a weight 200 times greater than the animal itself, highly intelligent, and has its limb girdles, cervical vertebrae and the tail so organised that all of these can be withdrawn, out of sight, under the shell,[7] a feat that no other animal can match. The tortoise carapace or shell is the all-embracing, abstract noumenon that, as it were, puts forth the phenomenal universe in the form of its limbs, head and tail. Whatever that is phenomenal has the dual quality of is there – is not there, asti-naasti, an outstanding feature of every illusion that Maya creates. The anatomy of TUT can now be spelled out partwise : (1) The shell is Information, (2) The head is Cosmos, (3) The tail is Chaos, (4) The right forelimb is Yin Yang, (5) The left forelimb is Hubble-Bubble, (6) The right rear limb is Qualtum Commander, (7) The left rear limb is TITE Principle. Let us now see how each of the foregoing fits into medical scheme of things. Information TITE Principle and Qualtum Cosmics-et-Chaotics The fleeting, material phenomenal universe has its permanent opposite in noumenon/universal mind/Brahman. The formed - universe has its - substratum. The former is, because of the latter. Every formation - animate or inanimate, smallest to the largest - is, at the pleasure of, and superimposed upon the substratum of information. Information, being neither matter nor energy, occupies no space, covers no distances, is free from the limitations of space and time. The Informational Universe - nouniverse - is the surest synonyms of Vedantic Advaitism and Spinoza’s Monism. No sooner had this idea come to me that I realised what the Buddha was telling us 2500 years ago, when he spoke of the Transparency and self-enlightenment of the law. All things in the universe are related one to the other. The whole can be seen in any part. The universe is implicit in a little finger; its ultimate truth is embodied in a single flower. MASAHIRO MORI[8] The Buddha in the Robot Let us shift from the ulnarly placed “little finger” to the radially placed (left) thumb, and zero in on the print of its terminal phalanx, called LTI or Left Thumb Impression. No two LTI’s, even of Siamese twins, have ever been alike. SANA - Snowflakes Are Never Alike - is a wonder that makes each snowflake, made of 100 million million million water molecules, unprecedented, unparalleled, unrepeatable. DNA fingerprinting (DeOxyRiboNucleicAcid Glyphics - DORNAglyphics) is the latest avtar of what so far was Bertillon system of ordinary fingerprinting, both unfailingly reliable. A snowflake in the Artic had had to be, has to be, will have to be unfailingly different from a snowflake in the Antarctic of the remotest past, of the fleeting present, or the most distant future. Moral: All snowflakes of all times communicate with one other. Each fashions its uniqueness - its uniquation or individuation - by taking recourse to the TITE principle: Total Inclusion = Total Exclusion. A snowflake S of the eternal here and now must, without a blink, know of all the snowflakes of all the times and places so as to be able to exclude each of them, guaranting thereby its own uniqueness. What applies to every snowflake applies to every atom, molecule, cell, cancer cell, gyral and sulcal pattern of the brain, dorsal venous pattern of the palm or hand. If every name has the blight of nemesis, it has the blessing of uniquation, individuation that is forever. In noumenal form, the uniqueness precedes the phenomenal form, accompanies it, and outlives it. Christ, when in the making in Mary’s womb, was required to make a fingerprint unlike that of Rama, Krishna, Gandhi, or Gavaskar. So each of these luminaries presented their LTI to Christ so that he could straight exclude them. In return, the noumenal Christ presented his print to each of the above when being fashioned in the womb. Truly, no men, nor mouse, nor molecule is an Island entire of itself, but an integral part of the main. Every thing, every cell, every body co-exists, is co-eval, within the cosmic ocean. A wave arises, looks like an individual, a phenomenon, bound to the ocean, and merging into it once its ephemeral, phenomenal stage is over. That particular wave was shaped by the TITE-mold. Needham’s poser[9] that “The riddle of form is the fundamental riddle” is resolved by the concept of TITE-mold. Each is shaped by all the rest, and vice versa. The first-human-being-ever is co-eval with all human beings of all times, for none truly dies for none is truly born. The Bhagwad Gita’s assurance that no one dies for no one is born has biological backing. Gita’s intuition is the informational law of the universe, that divests you even of immortality for you were nor are ever mortal in the first place. Qualtum cosmics-et-chaotics is what provides Quality to a person or to his/her features. Quality is a neti neti - not this, not this concept where you describe a thing or a person or a feature by being truly able to say that it is not this, it is not that, it just is what it is. The cosmics of Quality create a genius, a perfect palate, and its chaotics, integral to it, create a moron, a cleft-palate, a cancer cell. It is interesting that abnormality, literally, contains within itself normality, Chaos is primal, cosmos its child. Organised life, a cosmic event, was spawned in the womb of prelife, which was unorganised cancerous broth.[10] Cosmos and chaos must go hand in hand, for they represent The Two Hands of God.[11]. This is an era of Huxley’s Brave New World, of Dolly, of cloning.[12] In this media hype and brouhaha, it is clean forgotten that cloning is biologically impossible. The Qualtum cosmics sees to it that every ovum and every sperm is individuated. For cloning, the lowest common denominator is an ovum, each being unique. That rules out cloning right away. What the so-called Dolly-making has achieved is nuclear-swapping. Instead of the zygotic nucleus begetting a baby, another, biopolar somatic nucleus plays the role. Fertilization, as such is diploidization. So what ovular cytoplasm needs is not necessarily a sperm, but a diploid nucleus, for which, it may jetison its own original haploid nucleus. The informational-interconnectedness solves many an intellectual crisis in physics, and in its synonym, medicine. Einstein’s unceasing worry was about the riddle of two far-separated electrons instantaneously communicating with each other. The worry can be rested for informational-interconnectedness is beyond both space and time. Even the qualification instantaneous smacks of something happening, when in reality it does not happen. It was Herman Weyl[13] who rightly said : “The objective world simply is; it does not happen.” On the medical front, the uniqueness of each cancer, unpredictable and chaotic as it seems, is a part of a larger, cosmic order. A genius owes his or her faculty to a moron, much as a “normal” foot is at the pleasure of another “deformed” one. The other discomforting corollary is that one’s DORNAglyphics, one’s genes and one's genotype are a consequence of the TITE principle wherefrom orders come to shape and mould an individual. Therefore, genes, whatever they may be, do not give orders, but having received them, merely execute them. The Human Genome project and the dreams of Genetic Engineering must reckon with this bitter-sweet of cosmology. The cosmic-et-chaotic sweep that information exercises is best appreciated by the qualities ascribed to Chaitanya, Awareness, Tao or Brahman, each of which “formless, nameless, the motive of all movements and the mother of all substances”[14] regardless of the fact that It “undertakes no activity, yet nothing is left undone”[14]. Physics has moved from materiality and scientificality to spirituality. It’s time medicine follows suit.
This particular volume is the by-product of many years' interest in types of relationship which are at once difficult to express in language and yet fundamental to the order of life itself. I speak of the polar, reciprocal, or mutually sustaining relationship of events and forces that are usually considered to be opposed to or basically separate from one another. These "oppositions" include not only life and death, good and evil, light and darkness, but also the organism and its environment, the self and the not-self, the solid and the space, and the knower and the known. There has always been a certain difficulty in explaining the relationship between these terms as "transactional" - like buying and selling - such that the one term exists only in conjunction with the other. This points to the further insight that what is divided in terms, that is, in thought and language, may be united in fact. To be specific: the individual's sense of basic separation from his universe may be a perceptual illusion based upon inadequate concepts of sensing and knowing. ALAN WATTS[11] The Two Hands of God A female/woman/lady is the female/male for she incorporates within each synonym the male/man/lad of the species. One is because of the other and vice versa, the polar-apposite, mistakenly called the polar-opposites. That they mutually spawn each other to sustain each other is a cosmic wonder as great as Radha-Krishna, Lakshmi-Vishnu, Sita-Rama and Parvati-Shiva. The Chinese gave this pairing the general name of Yin-Yang, Indians did it genitally - Yoni-Lingam. The formless Allah, God or Brahman is a sexless, pole-less focal point that on splitting must beget two opposite/apposite poles called yin-yang, yoni-lingam, female-male, (magnetic) north pole - south pole, negative charge - positive charge, ma-ya. The two poles beget between them a field that fashions all phenomena to beget the manifest, visible universe. The universe is electrostatically neutral for there is as much positive charge as there is negative charge. This is because a positive charge or a magnetic north pole (Yang) refuses to stay solo and always begets the apposite negative charge or the south pole (Yin). Yin always induces the formation of Yang (hence yangduction), and vice versa (yinduction). Yinduction and yangduction form the basis of the manifest universe, of matter, of energy, and in the current world scene, of entertainment and communication. We shall refer to the principle that expresses man’s knowledge of the integrated unity of nature as the principle of dualistic monism. The Kojiki makes special reference to the male and female - the yin and yang aspects of each stage and posits these polar forces as the ultimate driving energies within the universe. Energy throughout the universe always appears in this dualistic structure. At present, no one knows what distinguishes positive from negative charge. These two poles - the yin and the yang - are, therefore, never distinct; there is always this connecting flow uniting them into a larger whole. NAHUM STISKIN[15] The Looking Glass God … Shinto, Yin-Yang and a Cosmology for Today. The inseparability of yin from yang, and their indistinguishability, is the engine of the manifest universe, at once effortless and in need of no fuelling ever. It verily constitutes the stuff of allegedly unfulfillable dream of perpetuum mobile – perpetual motion : “The term applied to some theoretical force that will move a machine for ever of itself – a mirage which holds attraction for some minds ….. According to the laws of thermodynamics it is impossible”[6]. The anomalous expansion of water has proved physics wrong in a way. Yinduction and yangduction is yet another example where the second law of thermodynamics bites the dust. There are diverse phenomena that are readily explained by yin-yang symphony, musically called moto perpetuo, or the eternal note. The fact that a light (read, any electromagnetic) wave starting from a galaxy 15000 billion light years away should travel ceaselessly, fuellessly, at the constant absolute speed of 186000 miles per second can have only one explanation: The yin part of the wave induces its yang which in turns induces its yin, ad eturnum et infinitum. The word wave is inappropriate for it can, etymologically, waver, and can have a crescendo and a diminuendo. The better would be WyWy, which when spoken reminds you of the two Y’s of yin and yang. In an atom[16], the electron spins round the nucleus at about 600-800 miles a second and the neutron round the proton at 40,000 miles a second, ceaselessly. This inexhaustible power can come only if yin begets yang and vice versa, ceaselessly and effortlessly. Moreover, since yin and yang are oppositely directed, to right away explain the ½ spin that every electron exhibits. DNA multiplication is a very rapid process wherein the Lord first proclaims “I am one I become many - Eko aham, bahushyam,” and then does so to spawn a whale out of a single cell. At the time of cell-division, or rather cell-duplication, the two helices separate. The yin-helix induces yang, and the yang-helix induces yin, and presto, there are now double helices, two nuclei, two cells. A yin helix exhibits pairacity by re-pairing itself, by a yang, and vice versa. Cytoreplication is the material basis of the biological kingdom. Each cell multiplies in a ToFi – Total Fidelity - fashion. This can only happen if the two halves of every conceivable part of a cell begets its polar apposite through yangduction and yinduction. In the majestic Einsteinean equation E-mc2, C is for the constancy of the speed of any electromagnetic radiation, ranging from a minute microwave to a mile-long megawave. One factor that provides the C is the fact that, no matter what, yin and yang induce each other in such a way that the distance that they cover in a second is 186000 miles or the time that they take to cover this distance is 1 second, be it orbiting of an electron, multiplication of DNA or cell, or a microwave oven. The current electronic, computer, communication, entertainment, cyberspace and what we will have is basically dependent on the constant speed with which WyWy travels, and the ToFi with which it replicates even the information that it carries in its bosom.
To the eye of wisdom size makes no difference. ALAN WATTS[11] The Two Hands of God Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view? VICTOR HUGO[17] Les Miserables Edwin Hubble noted the red shift and gave the concept of a universe that is forever expanding. To a school child, the metaphor provided was of a dotted balloon progressively filled with air to carry the (dots) galaxies apart. As biologists and medical men, our concern is with the bang-opposite of the reality of infinitely contracting universe – an unimaginably small bubble that, however, is a perfect match for a very large universe first thought of by Hubble. Cosmologists (and telescopists) think of in terms of “billion-billion-billion-billionth part of a second” and microscopists can complementally think of a billion-billion-billion-billionth part of a millimeter. Chronologists or temporologists (time-scientists) now talk of a femtosecond which is a thousandth of a picosend. "To grasp this, consider that there are more femtoseconds in one second than there were seconds in the past 31 million years"[18]. Even if this is further divided by a billion, it can never tend to be zero-space (or zero-time). Moral of the story is that much as it is difficult to reach the outer limit of the universe, so is it difficult, nay impossible to reach its inner limit. No wonder that our rishis had had to think of God as not only larger than the largest but smaller than the smallest as well. The burden of the Hubble-Bubble concept is to make clear a point : No space is too small for Nature’s working, and therein, no task is too large. The homeobox concept[19] in embryology tells us that all fully formed mammalian embryos are of the same size - 2.5 cm. A whale, programmed to be 100 and 100 tons starts as a 2.5 cm individual, as does an elephant. The minutest structure of the animal is there with none of its mega-details compromised, and “enough” of free-space around. So we see a nanobacterium with a diameter of 50-500 nanometers sculpting a shell 2 micrometers in diameter, showing a huge well in its centre[20]. This example well illustrates the fact that “smallness” of space resides in the human eye, not in reality. A mm is one forty billionth of the Earth’s circumference. If a mm is further reduced to billion billion of its original, still it won’t be zero, can’t be zero. “Multiplying zero even by a million (or zillion) would leave us with zero”[21]. The infinite contractibility of the spatial universe, combined with the essential spaceless of information, allows the current information revolution to pack more and more information into less and less material. "The present call capacity of the fiber-optic cable is only a fraction of its potential. `If we had all the necessary electronic equipment at the ends,' says Frank Gratzer, a manager at Bellcore, `you could carry the entire telephone traffic in the United States with one fiber, and that's at the busy hour, combining both voice and data traffic. The capacity is essentially unlimited.' He adds that it might be decades before we can invent the electronics to harness this capacity, however"[22]. The unimaginable non-materiality of information or gnan brings us to reconsider a Vedic blessing. Om Purnamadah purnamidam purnat purnamudacyate purnasya purnamadaya purnamevavasisyate Completeness is that, completeness is this from completeness, completeness comes forth. Completeness from completeness taken away completeness to completeness added, completeness alone remains. An imparter of gnan is endowed with the assurance that even if all her/his gnan is given away, she/he will have lost nothing but the one to whom it is given would have acquired everything. Perfection minussed from perfection leaves perfection behind. No wonder, it was an Indian tradition that a teacher should never charge, for he can’t be rewarded materially for the immateriality that he parts with.
Chaos is the current, scientific summing up of science’s helplessness. “A state of apparent randomness and unpredictability… the processes which scientists call chaos appear at first sight to be random, utterly confused, and disordered”[23]. (ODNW) Heisenherg’s Uncertainty principle, has been, as it were, one upped by something yet more sinister. You, given all your gadgetic wizardry and learned wisdom, just don’t know what the next event will be in the animate and inanimate world. No wonder, a leading lexicon[24] goes on to define chaos as “a state of things in which chance is supreme: nature that is subject to no law.” (Web) The word chaos has interesting, simple etymology: Rooted in Gk. khaos meaning an abyss, something just hollow, vast chasm or void, it has been taken to mean[25] the “primordial formless void.” (ODE) A Dictionary of Mythology[26] is kinder to chaos when it defines it as “a dark and limitless void, which was all that existed before the creation of the universe.” Chaos existed before cosmos. It thus formed a substratum to cosmos, giving it a background much as the dark background of night allows the stellar cosmos to be delineated clearly. To the human eye, cosmos is whatever is definable, limitable, comprehensible. Hence cosmos is necessarily an island of human imagination in the vast and unfathomable sea called chaos. Chaos thus supersedes cosmos. If the universe were to be singly named, it could be called chosmos. “Chaos is ubiquitous; it is stable; it is structured”[27]. Could CHAOS read Cosmic Harmony Apparently Orderlessly Styled? The slur of randomness and unpredictability foisted on chaos is borne out of human arrogance and ignorance. Till we accept that the infinitely and eternally pervasive qualtum cosmics will rule the roost to spring for you yet another surprise, you will beat your chest crying “chaos chaos” which, if you clear your eyes is the other, more fundamental face of cosmos. If cosmos is assigned a big C, then chaos will have to be given a bigger C; and the biggest C to Chaitanya or consciousness that, in one sweep, can accommodate within itself both chaos and cosmos. He had gained a specific interest in the heart, however, after he helplessly witnessed the sudden cardiac deaths of two people, one a relative on a summer vacation, the other a man in a pool where Winfree was swimming. Why should a rhythm that has stayed on track for a lifetime, two billion or more uninterrupted cycles, through relaxation and stress, acceleration and deceleration, suddenly break into an uncontrolled, fatally ineffectual frenzy? JAMES GLEICK[27] Chaos The big “why” in the above, day-to-day global happening is replied to if we think a little deep.[28] With each breath, you first inspire, and then expire. Inspiration is always followed by expiration, but not vice versa. Expiration or chaos is more lasting than inspiration or cosmos. With each heart beat, the lubb of life or cosmos is followed by a longer dupp of death or chaos. In the case histories alluded to above, the cycle of cosmos-chaos had had to be eventually dominated by lasting chaos.
To a medical man steeped in science and le technique, granting chaos a place in the scheme of medical things is humiliation. To grant chaos a place higher than cosmos is downright degradation. Let us listen to a confession as recent as of 1997: “My reverie led me to wonder why some patients who don’t heed our advice do well, while some others who faithfully follow our recommendations have devastating outcomes.” (Federman)[29] First, let us grow epistemologic - to know what we can, what we just can’t. The Oxford Companion to Medicine[30] is of help : “It needs to be more generally recognized that most of medicine is about relief of, and comfort in, suffering, and in the main very little to do with saving life.” A unhurried, honest perusal of “anti-establishment” medical literature reveals that preventively, therapeutically and progressively, modern medicine can be so impotent that even a stiff dose of technological Viagra would make no change. The avowed failure - Doing Better and Feeling Worse[31] - stems from medical men’s inability to say “yea” to a number of self-evident truths. Superdeterminism - “the Buddhist view of reality”[32] - ordains that a person’s cancer or coronary is programmed before the person is conceived. The cancer or coronary does not occur, but the flow of the person into a life-time continuum gives us that illusion. That being so, there is neither preventing it, nor curing it. What medical men have to cultivate is Saakshibhav - the art of witnessing, the quality of witnesses. A sense of wonder for the human organism and for Vis Medicatrix Naturae. What the sense of wonder brings in its wake is the double gift of humility and reverence, an affective state that finds its expression in philosophy. Philosophy, the dictionaries assert[23], is scientia scientiarum, the science of all sciences. Today, modern physics bristles more with philosophy than with physics. A similar philosophic bent can be accorded to the physician's art of having to deal with human birth, life, ageing, diseasing, and death. A noumenal approach, going well beyond the phenomenal, is overdue in modern medicine.
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