Here's a fun thread in the making. The Edge World Question for 2009 is as follows:
What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?
If you're familiar with The Edge's annual survey of scientists, science writers and scientific types, you know how fascinating the answers are. Follow the link above to get started reading them -- and then share in the comboxes your own answer to the question, and how you reached that conclusion.
I hadn't intended to write about this until I had more information, and was able to be more specific. But inasmuch as it occupies my thoughts a lot these days, and it's possible that I'll be off this year to do a fellowship studying this, and even writing a book about it, I'll throw out some tentative thoughts here, in hope that some of you will be able to add insight. With that preliminary out of the way, here's my answer to the question:
I believe that I'll live to see quantum physics change the way we understand healing and the human body.
I've become friends with a practitioner of alternative medicine, a young doctor who found his way to Eastern Orthodox Christianity because he could not account within a Western theological framework for the amazing things he was seeing and doing in his practice. Orthodox metaphysics squared the circle for him. I'm going to be deliberately obscure about this, because I want to respect his privacy. As he explains it, though, his work in "informational medicine" is not woo-woo "faith healing"; it's based on discoveries in quantum physics. He has told me, in lengthy conversations, that Chinese medicine really is onto something with its focus on energy. I'd mentioned to him that when Julie had shingles earlier this year, acupuncture was the only thing that really gave her relief from the excruciating pain. Yes, he said, there's a reason for that.
Well, since we've gotten to know each other, I've seen him in action, and it's just astonishing. Some of what he does can be accounted for by discoveries and ideas discussed in Lynne McTaggart's fascinating popular science book "The Field." I've also found it helpful to have read Dr. David Servan-Schreiber's "The Instinct to Heal". What he does has something to do with this. My doctor friend, in one session, without laying a hand on me, healed me of a chronic problem that had been afflicting me for most of this year. I intend to write about this in more detail later. He also diagnosed other problems that he simply could not have known about -- including something that had once happened to me that I didn't know about myself, until I phoned my mother after the session and asked her if it was true (it was).
Again, he adamantly maintains this isn't psychic-healer mumbo-jumbo at all -- and as a devout conservative Christian, he's concerned about this sort of thing. He believes that 90 percent of our illnesses can be healed by the body itself, via nutrition and other means -- and that there's nothing New Agey or faith-healer-y about this. "In a hundred years, this will be mainstream medicine," he once told me. "Physics is laying the groundwork for it now, but medical science is reluctant to follow."
Having seen what he's been able to do for me, and knowing how acupuncture helped my wife's pain when nothing else would, I'm interested in researching the connections, if any, between quantum physics, some alternative medicine techniques, and Orthodox Christian metaphysics. If I get the fellowship, that's what I'll be working on. One of the bases of this research, according to my doctor friend, is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identifies in his answer to the Edge question: the end of false distinctions in analytic science. Mihaly C. writes:
The idea that will change the game of knowledge is the realization that it is more important to understand events, objects, and processes in their relationship with each other than in their singular structure.Western science has achieved wonders with its analytic focus, but it is now time to take synthesis seriously. We shall realize that science cannot be value-free after all. The Doomsday clock ticking on the cover of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists ever closer to midnight is just one reminder that knowledge ignorant of consequences is foolishness.
Chemistry that shrugs at pollution is foolishness, Economics that discounts politics and sociology is just as ignorant as are politics and sociology that discount economics.
Unfortunately, it does not seem to be enough to protect the neutral objectivity of each separate science, in the hope that the knowledge generated by each will be integrated later at some higher level and used wisely. The synthetic principle will have to become a part of the fundamental axioms of each science. How shall this breakthrough occur? Current systems theories are necessary but not sufficient, as they tend not to take values into account. Perhaps after this realization sets in, we shall have to re-write science from the ground up.
My doctor friend says that science cannot afford to be ignorant of the wisdom of religion -- that while science is not religion, religion and spiritual wisdom traditions can speak of truths that are important to science, and important for science not to ignore or discard. Anyway, all of this is a long-winded way of saying that I expect to see some alternative medicine techniques becoming more mainstream in Western medicine, riding on the back of quantum physics.
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I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Kate
http://educationonline-101.com
While the therapies and practices mentioned here may very well be useful, it is a mistake to explain them through "quantum physics", which is a science that should not be used to explain holistic medicine. While there are scientists who do very complicated work applying quantum-mechanical techniques to chemical systems, which can be made to apply to biochemical, cytological, and pharmacological models etc, this sort of mathematically rigorous, computation-intensive work is not what "energy medicine" practitioners do. True, features of the chemical and molecular dynamics in the body so critical to health can (in principle) be modeled through quantum-chemistry algorithms, but again, this has nothing to do with New Age healing.
Notice I am not saying that "energy medicine" doesn't work. That is a different argument, but it is a mistake to claim that insofar as it does work, the underlying mechanism is because of quantum physics. See for yourself, go look at ANY actual textbook actually about quantum mechanics itself, and try to find anything about energy healing. It is possible that some sorts of energy medicine are clinically useful, but the explanation may very well be found in some existing mechanism. Or perhaps new mechanisms will be needed that will radically revise our scientific understanding of health and the body, but even these may have nothing to do with quantum mechanics.
There are some physicists and others out there who have developed quantum mechanical models of aspects of biological systems, such as electron tunneling through protein molecules, and our health certainly depends on protein activity. Perhaps the ideas of a brilliant maverick like Roger Penrose will be validated, and the relevance of quantum mechanics to cognition will be verified. Maybe our understanding of health will need to be adjusted as the relationship between biochemistry and physics becomes more clear. As of now, these caveats notwithstanding, arguing for the relevance of actual quantum-mechanical data (as opposed to physics-appropriating speculation) to health is not scientifically or clinically serious, though this may eventually change, given evidence.
While some credulous New Age gurus and outright charlatans are doing their best to co-opt actual physics concepts, we should recognize that there are physicians and other healers honestly looking to quantum physics to explain genuinely puzzling clinical phenomena. I am not espousing vulgar reductionism and certainly not materialist dogma: maybe something real will come out of this frontier of knowledge, eventually. But be skeptical and watch your wallet when wizards and shamans mix and matching physics ideas with speculative theories on health, wealth, and relationships. Remember Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation should be made to suffice whenever possible. Right now, the preponderance of available evidence suggests that quantum mechanics should not be used to explain health, much less the wild and woolly world of energy medicine.
One thing to add to Owen's comments...
A very useful approach I believe many quantum mind theorists are missing is to study the properties of neural systems from a evolutionary or comparative perspective. Characterize the *simplest* systems or organisms with the fewest components and then work to the more complex. For example, microorganisms like hydras, nematodes, jellyfish and starfishes have much less complex networks. Do these organisms' sensing capabilities require 'special' quantum mechanisms? We know that at various times during evolution that additional components and complexity arose. At what stage in evolution would alternate mechanisms like quantum computing necessarily arise? The experience of taste, vision and self arose at various periods in our evolutionary past and so it would be extremely useful to see exactly which new biological feature lead to the emergence of any particular new capability. From my perspective, starting from human consciousness and declaring that quantum explanations are explicitly required to understand it is a bit bass-ackwards. It's like trying to unravel a tangle of string from the middle. Better to figure out the simple steps / simple systems first and build understanding incrementally.
Owen: Right now, the preponderance of available evidence suggests that quantum mechanics should not be used to explain health, much less the wild and woolly world of energy medicine.
Exactly. Does anyone still keep a chart of their biorhythms? At least they were right about half the time...
Yet another attempt to throw a little science muscle behind complete malarkey! Please stay out of the deep end of the physics pool if you don't know how to swim.
My apologies for taking so long to reply, MargaretE.
There are three ways to proceed once the accurate gene testing exists.
The first is what many Orthodox Jews are already doing to limit Tay-Sachs and Canavan Disease births. Everyone marriageable gets tested. Marriages involve a matchmaker who knows definitively who is and isn't carrier; that gets around the aversion to concrete knowledge of status some have. The matchmaker doesn't so much tell people who to marry as avoids setting up people who are both carriers. And warns those couples that do form where both are carriers. It works: it is news when a single infant with Tay-Sachs is born in NYC these days.
A problem with the method is that the next generation will have just as many carriers, perhaps even somewhat more, and will have to repeat the process. The other problem is that it does prevent or break up some good couples.
The second and major means I am thinking of is IVF with selected, genetically tested, zygotes. People who have the serious genetic diseases in their families, especially those diseases with destructive social consequences such as schizophrenia or hereditary breast cancer, are in my experience going to run, not walk, to the clinics when that becomes possible and available. And after them, people whose trouble is with bad chronic things like sickle cell anemia, hereditary epilepsy, hereditary diabetes, cystic fibrosis.
The method definitely decreases the number of carriers of dominant effect mutations rapidly: whole diseases of the kind will disappear in a generation or two. The method is less effective with recessive effect mutations, since many/most carriers will not care to or will not be willing to pay the steep expense of the IVF approach if their mate is not a carrier for rather theoretical benefit. But numbers should nonetheless drop every generation because the children of affected families refuse to repeat the experience.
I am sure it will all be and remain voluntary. If you have been at a children's hospital for long, you know that almost every mother is willing to do almost anything for the wellbeing of her child and retrospectively wishes she could have done something, anything, to prevent the child's suffering and disability. Fathers tend to be a bit slower but arrive at the same place. As for what insurance companies and mainstream society will do toward of people who choose otherwise, I cannot say. I suspect the people who willingly choose to have children with serious disorders will at that point already be people that no longer regard themselves as fully in the mainstream, competing for maximal social status, and highly willing to support the child(ren) themselves with both time and mondy.
Yes, IVF is problematic or proscribed according to conservative ethics. But infertile couples rarely bother themselves with that today: the child that gets born matters more to them than anything else. People who see the choice as between children who are healthy and none (i.e. high odds of ones that die after lifetimes of physiological or psychological hell) are probably not going to think too differently.
As a third: in a decade or two it will become possible to make germline stem cells from/for anyone. Germline stem cells are unique in that they can be gotten to replace a bit of DNA with a very similar other one, i.e. existing DNA sequence can be corrected by supplying fixed DNA bits into the cells and letting them integrate into the most similar DNA in the chromosomes. (A phenomenon called site-specific recombination.) It may well become possible to correct 2 or 3 identified DNA errors/problems, or 5, in a glstc line and then create gametes with the repaired chromosomes. (People carry, on average, 6 to 7 recessive effect mutations with detectable consequences.) After that technology becomes available there will be diminishing need for selective IVF.
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