The Rainbow and the Worm: the Physics of Organisms (2nd Edn)

by Mae-Wan Ho

World Scientific, Singapore, 1998

ISBN 981-02-3426-0

The question addressed by this book is the age-old one: "what is life?" Mae-Wan Ho presents an interconnected system of proposals, experimental results and conjectures which go a large way towards providing an entirely new answer to this question. It is based on research which is mainstream in its theoretical physical foundations, though innovatory in some of its techniques. This makes the book highly important, and if she is right it would be revolutionary. At the very least, it reinstates the question as one worth asking, at a time when the consensus answer might be "life is nothing particular" — even from those are happy to admit that there is an outstanding problem with understanding conscious awareness. This second edition is extensively revised with three new chapters reflecting progress in research since the first edition.

The central proposal is that life is characterised by coherence. An organism is defined by a coherence within itself, and it is capable of extending the coherence to other organisms with which it may enter into a special form of communication. The idea draws on the two areas of thermodynamics and quantum theory. Although coherence alone is not a definition of life (lasers are coherent but not alive), it is a key feature.

The context of the concept of coherence is the idea that "life is a process of being an organizing whole". She notes carefully that "organisation is not the same thing as order" and that it is a matter of "organized complexity". It is then coherence that provides, or is the manifestation of, this organization. Coherence is first introduced in the context of coherent energy. To understand this central idea, one must realise that "energy" ¾ even in the strictly physical sense used here ¾ is a multifaceted concept. It is always a relative concept (there is no such thing as the absolute quantity of energy in a system; only changes in energy can be defined) and in most cases it is not the change in energy which is significant, so much as the change in usefully available energy. To measure this last one usually adds to the "straight" energy additional quantities that compensate for availability or lack of it, producing a definition of "free energy". Mae-Wan Ho goes beyond this to define an energy that expresses the extent of energy being stored in a way that maximises its organisation. It is no longer a quantity like mass, obtained by summing up the system as a whole; instead it is a quantity the measures the way energy is distributed in a space-time that is itself structured according to the needs of the organism.

In addition, coherence is also a property of fields, such as the electromagnetic field that constitutes light, which are called coherent if their oscillations at distant points are nearly in phase. This again refers to the organisation of the field in space and time in relation to the organism: a coherent field results in the organism being harmoniously synchronised like a well rehearsed orchestra, without the need to be exchanging specific communication signals. Finally, the concept of coherence can be further extended into the twentieth century world of quantum theory, where several entirely new phenomena that integrate the behaviours of distantly separated parts deserve the description of "coherence". Quantum entanglement is the most distinctive example, being associated with properties of the organism as a whole that cannot be localised in its parts.

Further research is needed to determine whether or not quantum coherence really does happen in biological systems. As a result "[t]here is as yet no direct evidence that organisms are coherent" (p 135). The book describes, however, an impressive range of indirect evidence for this and other sorts of coherence. Those that struck me especially were the microscope pictures of living organisms in transmitted polarised light, showing that the aqueous intra cellular fluid, previously regarded as an amorphous "soup" was highly structured, with long range molecular order analogous to that of liquid crystals; and the quoted observations of the character of photons emitted by organisms (biophotons) whose anti-bunching statistics were a clear hallmark of the quantum coherence of the emitted light - which is strongly suggestive of quantum coherence in the organism itself.

In order to link observations with theory, further research needs to ask, which of these different mechanisms actually happen in real life? Which of them are characteristic of life - or (which may amount to the same thing) which of these is really responsible for the co-ordination of the transfer of stored energy? A great deal hangs on the answer. If it turns out that quantum entanglement is crucial, then the implications are vast: the effects of entanglement are completely independent of distance (they have been detected in particles separated by 41 km). Thus this would open up a very real possibility of becoming to some degree "one with the system", which she rightly stresses as "the essence of aesthetic or mystical experience."

The final chapter expands on the exciting possibilities of this vision. I was particularly struck by the argument for an organisms own "internal space-time structure" relating to Bergson’s durée reel, an idea which would bring into the picture the insights of other philosophers (such as Whitehead and Capek) influenced by Bergson, and making the first steps towards an integrated science of the subjective and objective. It could be these final speculations which will stand as the main importance of this book.