The Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton [39]
CHAPTER 4
THE NEW PHYSICS:
Planting Both Feet
Firmly on Thin Air
When I was an ambitious undergraduate biology major in the 1960s, I knew that to have a prayer of getting into a prestigious graduate school I needed to take a physics course. My college offered a basic introductory course, something like Physics 101, which covered fundamental topics like gravity, electromagnetism, acoustics, pulleys, and incline planes in a way that was easily understood by non-physics majors. There was also another course called Quantum Physics, but almost all of my peers avoided it like the plague. Quantum physics was shrouded in mystery—we biology majors were convinced that it was a very, very “weird” science. We thought only physics majors, masochists, and outright fools would risk five credits on a course whose premise was: “Now you see it. Now you don’t.”
In those days the only reason I would have been able to come up with for taking a quantum physics course was that it would have served as a great pickup line at parties. In the days of Sonny and Cher it would have been très chic to say, “Hey, babe, I’m into quantum physics. What sign are you?” On the other hand, even that might not be true—I never saw quantum physicists at parties or, in fact, anywhere else. I don’t think they got out much.
So I reviewed my transcripts, weighed the options, and took the easy way out by selecting Physics 101. I was intent on becoming a biologist. I had no interest in having my career aspirations depend on some slide-rule-slinging physicist singing the praises of ephemeral bosons and quarks. I and virtually every other biology major either paid little attention to or completely ignored quantum physics as we pursued our studies in the life sciences.
Unsurprisingly, given our attitude, we biology majors didn’t know much about physics, the one with all the equations and mathematics. I knew about gravity—heavy things tend to end up at the bottom and lighter things on top. I knew something about light—plant pigments such as chlorophyll and animal visual pigments such as the rhodopsin in the retina, absorb some colors of light and are “blind” to others. I even knew a little about temperature—high temperatures inactivate biological molecules by causing them to “melt” and low temperatures freeze and preserve molecules. I am obviously exaggerating to stress the point that biologists traditionally don’t know much physics.
My quantum-physics-deprived background explains why, even when I rejected nucleus-based biology and turned to the membrane, I still didn’t understand the full implications of that shift. I knew that integral membrane proteins hook up with environmental signals to power the cell. But because I didn’t know anything about the quantum universe, I did not fully appreciate the nature of the environmental signals that start the process.
It wasn’t until 1982, more than a decade after I had finished graduate school, that I finally learned how much I had missed when I skipped quantum physics in college. I believe that had I been introduced to the quantum world in college, I would have turned into a biology renegade much earlier. But on that day in 1982, I was sitting on the floor of a warehouse in Berkeley, California, 1,500 miles from home, lamenting the fact that I had seriously compromised my scientific career on a failed attempt to produce a rock ‘n’ roll show. The crew and I were stranded—we had run out of money after six shows. I had no cash and whenever I offered my credit card, the merchant’s credit approval machine displayed a skull and crossbones. We were living on coffee and doughnuts while we proceeded through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grieving, over the death of our show: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, finally, acceptance. (Kübler-Ross 1997) But at that