The Seven Mysteries of Life

by Guy Murchie

  Now to shift our attention from the mental side of the microcosm for a moment, let's look at the surprisingly sophisticated social life of the electron and its sister particles, regulated by the quantum caste system of seven concentric "galleries" of orbits surrounding the atom's nucleus as a kind of theater nicely symbolic of the seven ancient planets or the seven notes of the musical scale. Most of these galleries are subdivided into sections in which the electrons circulate around the atom's central nuclear court, the lowest and smallest of the seven being the most exclusive and popular with its cozy "bridal chamber," fitted out for only two electrons, which, under Pauli' s well-established exclusion principle, must be of opposite spin (the microequivalent of sex), the next gallery with four rooms of two kinds occupied by similar couples, the third with eighteen of three varieties, and so on up, all the electrons and occasional visitors (such as photons) having to obey very strict rules of behavior, particularly in the matter of choosing mates and moving from gallery to gallery.

  The etiquette of this particle society, according to Henry Margenau, research director for the Foundation for Integrative Education, actually enables it to survive harmoniously inside the atom almost entirely by virtue of the fact that "one electron knows what the others are doing and acts accordingly..." This observation has particular meaning for the case when matter is cooled close to absolute zero, where the normal random thermal vibration of its molecules slows into an orderly calm (of relative negentropy), allowing the particles' wave properties to become dominant and therefore their mental aspects and presumed latent consciousness to assert itself.

  An example of such glacial independence of micro-will may be the fantastic superfluidity of liquid helium at 40 above absolute zero, a component of which has been reported to flow in the form of "whole atoms completely without friction," slithering along as a film a few millionths of an inch thick that tends to cling to solid surfaces, yet may advance as much as a foot per second, even "siphoning" itself spontaneously out of cups. And certain metals at this temperature have revealed the phenomenon of superconductivity under which electrical resistance vanishes and the loose electrons that constitute an electric current fly onward through atom after atom as freely as the moon flies through "empty" space.

  This sort of liberation does not stop at absolute zero either, for a kind of nadir "temperature range" has been discovered within the atom, manifested by nothing but the damped spinning of nuclei, which descends to colder and slower states after all motion of whole atoms and molecules (ordinary heat) has died away. This subabsolute temperature depth is very hard to explore of course, but physicists already know that some nuclear spins have more energy than others, while all spinning nuclei use their magnetic fields to influence one another. And we are finding out that the consequence of this influence is that both fast (high energy) and slow (low energy) spinning can spread from atom to atom in waves through subabsolute matter probably in much the same way heat and cold diffuse through normal matter. And, since these waves must surely be a function or aspect of the matter waves Bohr posited, some of your thoughts may be not only deeper and cooler than you know but they may be disseminating themselves through the world in waves that literally leave thinkprints all the way down to matter's subsubbasement.

  It was a different sort of evidence of mind waves, however, that was researched a few years ago by Andrew Cochran, the biophysicist from Missouri who overcame his traditional skepticism by comparing the heat capacities of all the common elements (the amount of heat required to raise their temperatures 1° C.). He did it in preparation for his thesis at the University of Missouri Graduate School on "the quantum-mechanical wave properties of matter in living organisms." Evidently he had noticed that substances of low heat capacity always have a correspondingly high degree of wave nature, and this suggested to him that such elements must have more of the quality known as "consciousness" than the higher heat materials. So when he checked the most widely used element in living tissue, carbon, and found it to have the lowest heat capacity of all the elements (1.8 at 0° C.), he saw at once how this could explain carbon's extraordinary distribution into five times as many different compounds as all the other elements put together. For even though carbon's sociability had for a long time been logically attributed to the valency of its four outer electrons, there just had to be some profounder consequence resulting from carbon's ample consciousness. And does not consciousness, after all, signify life?

  The element with the next lowest heat capacity turned out to be hydrogen (2.3), which, with carbon (and sometimes oxygen), builds the ubiquitous hydrocarbon and carbohydrate chains that form a large percentage of Earth's organic stuff, ranging from marsh gas to wine to wood. Then came nitrogen (3.4) and oxygen (4.0) among the seven most "conscious" elements, followed closely by phosphorus and sulfur, these being the six most important elements in living organisms.

  Summing it all up, Cochran declared unequivocally that the wave-consciousness hypothesis "does not contradict any known fact." Furthermore, by his reckoning, "it is more consistent with the existence and evolution of living organisms and with the other known facts of science than is the accepted concept of lifeless atoms and particles." So he concluded that "what nature has been trying to say, through the ... emergence of quantum mechanics, may be that all matter has a rudimentary degree of mind..."

  Max Planck, discoverer of quantum mechanics, in effect had supported this concept from the first decade of this century, pointing out that an elementary particle of matter can no longer be considered to exist just in one part of whatever atom or molecule it happens to be in, for "in a sense, it exists simultaneously in every part of the system. And this simultaneous existence includes not only the field of force around the particle but also its mass and its charge." Thus the electrons and protons that are presumably the very plinth of matter are, like genes in the body, continuously influencing it as a whole, perhaps each in some still undreamed way holding a plan of the all, a mystic magnetic blueprint, even as your mind transcends space-time to guide the octillions of atoms that at any moment form your body.

  It is like saying that the field is part of the cow who grazes in it because she literally exchanges matter with the field almost continuously (at both her ends), not to mention breathing the sky (out as well as in) and participating indirectly but ultimately in the entire universe. Obviously this is something of a real-life rendition of Shakespeare's transcendent boast that "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space..." And in the memory of history it is an ecological version of ancient animism, a late form of which centered on the Pythagorean doctrine that the world itself has a soul, which was bequeathed to the Romans as anima mundi and revered by the Hindus as Atman. I have a feeling there is also evidence here that life is temporally symmetrical: if it has no beginning, it can have no end. And if it occupies any point in space, it must fill the universe.

  Chapter 15

  Life's Analogies on Land, Sea and Sky

  * * *

  I HAVE BEEN WATCHING the blue ball of Earth from this fair fetch in space for quite a spell now. Yet, strange to say, I have not gotten used to her. My consciousness somehow never quite lets me take her for granted, perhaps because she is too much part of me and me of her and her mysteries too immense for me to ignore or forget - ever.

  More important, my growing awareness of the omnipresence of life has steeped my being with a sense of intimate identity with the universe. For in truth there is no dearth of life anywhere, even though the key to it is evidently a shy and unidentified force that lurks in secret recesses of our world. presumably beyond the reach of mere matter. I surmise that, strictly speaking, the dint of life has nothing like muscle or nerves of its own, although of course it uses material muscle and nerve cells grown by its organisms. This may be possible because the balancings of forces in organisms are so delicate chemically and physically that life needs very little force beyond what chemists and physicists understand in order to
trigger action or implement a decision. But exactly where the subtle sway between going right or left begins has ever escaped analysis. Just how do thoughts enter the mind? When do crystals begin to decide? Is there a line between yes and no? Does a lily have a self? Is the germ governed by the disease or is the disease directed by its germs? Do parts integrate the whole or does the whole press harmony on its parts?

  These are the kinds of questions that relentlessly gnaw at the root of the mystery of life. If life's essence is securely hidden, it may be for a good reason: should man uncover many more of its secrets while he is still spiritually so immature, it seems he could do himself and his world serious harm (as he may already have begun to do). Indeed I feel little doubt that the mysteries of life and death are man's prime bulwark against himself until his soul is fledged.

  Meantime here is life with at least some of its abstract essence at hand to scrutinize and muse on. The bird, the weed and the burrowing worm are more than they seem, for, in truth, they and their haunts outline the invisible, crystalline texture of the living planet. Their bodies in space-time are literally part of the geometry of Earth, for the track each one makes throughout its life (what physicists call its "world line") defines a kind of invisible fiber of creation, a nerve cell of the multicellular territorial complex that makes up the biospheric grain of their world. It is a tenuous structure, this interlatticed biocrystal of unseen organic properties, one very difficult to visualize. It is as if millions of mental, political maps, each drawn to a different scheme for the same area, were superimposed invisibly upon one another - each strictly observed by its own animal or vegetable kind as human maps are read by humankind - a magic, crystal geometry of life delineated by the sparrow and the whale. No matter then what befalls any individual daisy or weasel or oyster, for one can be assured that daisiness and weaselry and oysterity will continue to occupy their allotted precincts and prevail.

  It is hard to be quite as sure that man will survive in view of the suicidal overtones of his current precocity, but, for all his growing pains, I am betting on him - and I have a feeling that today's dangerous germination period in his unique emergence may well (in history's long perspective) be not only normal but an essential leaven if what could be called man's half-baked present is to be permitted to rise into anything like the fully baked potential of his future. I consider it good for the imagination to look at the world from an off angle now and then, as I am doing, or mayhap from an exotic date to get us out of our twentieth-century rut, so I wonder about beings from other worlds in other ages who may have come to Earth. Could they have understood it? Would they have wanted to interact with it? And is it not conceivable that their outside view might be both fresher and truer than our own?

  Suppose a giant from Sirius, say, had turned up in the Mediterranean region a few thousand years ago - which just could have happened, though the people who saw him there in those ancient days would likely have assumed he came from some unknown or barbarian part of the still unexplored Earth - and suppose he was a serious student of foreign worlds (as were the first men on the moon) and that he witnessed and became interested in such a form of "life" as a galley or trireme with its oar "legs" propelling it through water. Such a Sirius student might, I presume, have been puzzled at first but, if he could have made his way close enough to observe that each "leg" was propelled by a separate organism potentially capable of living independently from the ship and its other "legs," even eager to be free to do so, he might well have wondered what kind of binding force or "nervous system" coordinated these legs to make the ship into a kind of living being.

  The same wonderment of course could have struck later arrivals from other worlds, perhaps the crews of flying saucers (if any) who still may be studying diesel trains, trucks, tankers, airliners or phenomena such as a mechanized army deploying like a plague of beetles. Even humans like me wonder about the life essence in such multicelled complexes - for the abstract factors involved are hardly what could be called comprehensible. These exotic visitors, however, if they really are (or have been) here, have at least one distinct advantage over humans in probing earthly life, for they presumably can sense Earth with unearthly senses. We, on the other hand, must labor under the built-in handicap that each of us is a creature of Earth and therefore a part of the very mystery we are trying to solve. Besides, it is patently very difficult for us mentally to slow down our tempos of comprehension by the factors of many thousands or millions that are obviously needed if we are to see the life in sand dunes, beaches, rivers, lakes, oceans, glaciers, islands, mountains and other slow-changing features of our planet, which, in their patient ways, exhibit basic attributes of life.

  SAND DUNES

  Did you know, for example, that sand dunes are classified in what may be called different species depending on the environment in which they live? They range in size from overgrown ripples a few feet tall to mountainous Saharan "whalebacks" 700 feet high and nearly 200 miles long. In the Muslim lands of the star and crescent the commonest dunes are appropriately shaped like stars and crescents, the former formed by variable breezes, the latter driven before constant trade winds. Others, almost as appropriately, are scimitar-shaped, and natural scientists describe still others as transverse, parabolic, sigmoidal, pyramidal, etc. One peculiar species, found on riverbanks, is shaped mostly by floodwaters, giving it a wavy cross-bedding of internal layers that record its history - until the next flood. Although a few, such as the star dunes, remain almost in one spot, most dunes move noticeably with prevailing winds, including the so-called seasonal dunes of southeast Asia that reverse themselves twice a year under the very regular monsoon windshifts.

  Most familiar along seacoasts, I suppose, would be the foredune, a ridge of grass-fringed sand rising perhaps twenty or thirty feet behind an ocean beach. In many cases such a dune sooner or later gets blown inland by the wind, whirling forward grain by grain, inconspicuously but relentlessly becoming a traveling dune, among which species the faster-moving variety is called the barchan in Africa and Asia or the medano in Peru. Alongside the Nile south of Cairo, indeed small barchans are well known to march thirty feet apart at a pace of about a foot a day before the trade wind, like extremely slow sea waves, their curious dynamics regulated by the flow of billions of sand grains, which the wind naturally sorts by size and weight, the coarser grains being rolled up the windward slopes and over the crests by the main jets (blowing slightly spiralwise), while the finer sand floats off with the gentler side eddies, forming and maintaining the dune's characteristic crescent shape as surely as the body of an animal is maintained by its genes. The dune's height, under this regimen, is strictly limited by the wind to one eighteenth of the wavelength, while the dune is scalloped all over like a fish with tiny moving ripples (corresponding to scales), in width one-fourteenth their length - the whole a wondrous creeping organism sculpted and winnowed and steered entirely by the action of air upon flying grains of sand, a corporeal entity whose stability, feedback control and metabolism together constitute one of nature's most convincing demonstrations of the prime ingredients of life.

  If I have described the sand dune as an organism, however, I had better expand it to a superorganism. It is specifically a complex subworld of trillions of living inhabitants of at least a hundred species ranging from dune rabbits, the desert fox, birds, mice, lizards, snakes, toads, poplar trees, cactus and marram grass down to velvet ants, ant lions, worms, copepods, bacteria and viruses, most of whom travel right along with it, constantly adapting, extending or redigging their burrows, laying eggs in new places, sending down fresh leeward roots, broadcasting daily dividend spores on the wind.

  While the lizard swims through the sand with his hind legs weaving and wedging the grains apart, his forelegs tight to his sides, the sand fleas, protozoa and other microbes actually slither and ooze between the grains without appreciably disturbing them. Animal life is most active at dusk and dawn, when the extremes of the day's heat and the night's cold are g
one. Although generally very dry on top, the dune nevertheless has a water table below it normally within reach of its thirstier animals and plants, and the capillary action of the sand blots the water level upward a foot or more beneath the dune's center, so that a hidden dome of water full of microlife moves right along with the sand. Furthermore there is a circulation of water within the dune remarkably like the circulation of water inside a tree. Evaporation on the sand's surface at the crest has been found to draw moisture steadily upward from the depths during daylight hours, especially when the sun is shining hotly, in somewhat the same way that leaf evaporation pulls up a tree's sap. At other times rain upon the dune creates a surface downward flow like that in the bast under a tree's bark, and the convex slope of the water table deflects it into an outward flow deep underground.

  Occasionally reverting to a more animal nature, the dune has been known to give birth to offspring dunes, which linger near their mother for a decade or two until they are big enough to strike out on their own. It even has a voice, which evidently depends on the grains being of nearly the same size, highly polished and round, so they resonate when scuffed or rubbed together, producing a squeaking or whistling sound that, on a large scale, becomes a deep roar, particularly in the case of an avalanche down the slip face of a high dune in a windy period of rapid motion. "I have heard it in southwestern Egypt three hundred miles from the nearest habitation." reports Ralph A. Bagnold, a British physicist who studied dunes extensively in the 1930s, "... a vibrant booming so loud I had to shout to be heard by my companion. Soon other sources, set going by the disturbance, joined their music to the first with so close a note that a slow beat was clearly recognized. This weird chorus went on for more than five minutes continuously ..."