The Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton [42]
Remember the atomic models you studied in school, the ones with marbles and ball bearings going around like the solar system? Let’s put that picture beside the “physical” structure of the atom discovered by quantum physicists.
No, there has not been a printing mistake; atoms are made out of invisible energy not tangible matter!
So in our world, material substance (matter) appears out of thin air. Kind of weird, when you think about it. Here you are holding this physical book in your hands. Yet if you were to focus on the book’s material substance with an atomic microscope, you would see that you are holding nothing. As it turns out, we undergraduate biology majors were right about one thing—the quantum universe is mind-bending.
Let’s look more closely at the “now you see it, now you don’t” nature of quantum physics. Matter can simultaneously be defined as a solid (particle) and as an immaterial force field (wave). When scientists study the physical properties of atoms, such as mass and weight, they look and act like physical matter. However, when the same atoms are described in terms of voltage potentials and wavelengths, they exhibit the qualities and properties of energy (waves). (Hackermüller, et al, 2003; Chapman, et al, 1995; Pool 1995) The fact that energy and matter are one and the same is precisely what Einstein recognized when he concluded that E = mc. Simply stated, this equation reveals that energy (E) = matter (m, mass) multiplied by the speed of light squared (c). Einstein revealed that we do not live in a universe with discrete, physical objects separated by dead space. The Universe is one indivisible, dynamic whole in which energy and matter are so deeply entangled it is impossible to consider them as independent elements.
They Are Not Side Effects … They’re Effects!
The awareness that such profoundly different mechanics control the structure and behavior of matter should have offered biomedicine new insights into understanding health and disease. Yet even after the discoveries of quantum physics, biologists and medical students continue to be trained to view the body only as a physical machine that operates in accordance with Newtonian principles. In seeking knowledge of how the body’s mechanisms are “controlled,” researchers have focused their attention on investigating a large variety of physical signals, classified into discrete chemical families, including aforementioned hormones, cytokines, growth factors, tumor suppressors, messengers, and ions. However, because of their Newtonian, materialistic bias, conventional researchers have completely ignored the role that energy plays in health and disease.
In addition, conventional biologists are reductionists who believe that mechanisms of our physical bodies can be understood by taking the cells apart and studying their chemical building blocks. They believe that the biochemical reactions responsible for life are generated through Henry Ford–styled assembly lines: one chemical causes a reaction, followed by another reaction with a different chemical, etc. The linear flow of information from A to B to C to D to E is illustrated on the following page.
This reductionist model suggests that if there is a problem in the system, evident as a disease or dysfunction, the source of the problem can be attributed to a malfunction in one of the steps along the chemical assembly line. By providing the cell with a functional replacement part for the faulty element, by prescribing pharmaceutical drugs for example, the defective single point can theoretically be repaired and health restored. This assumption spurs the pharmaceutical industry’s search for magic-bullet drugs and designer genes.
However, the quantum perspective reveals that the universe is an integration of interdependent energy fields that are entangled in a meshwork of interactions. Biomedical scientists have been particularly confounded because they do not recognize the massive complexity of the intercommunication