Invited lecture at International Conference on Water, Hydrogen Bonding Materials and Nanomedicine, Academy of Sciences and Arts of the Republic of Serbia, Bans Palace, Benja Luka, 4 September 2010
A fully referenced version of this lecture plus power point presentation is available for download here
I fell in love with water and became a hydrophiliac 18 years ago, soon after I saw the little fruit fly larva emerge from the egg under the polarised light microscope, crawling about in all the colours of the rainbow dancing before my eyes, which no one else in the world had seen before.
I soon figured out that all the molecules in the cells and tissues of its body must be moving coherently together for that to happen. And the cell and tissue water too, must be involved as an intrinsic part of the polarised liquid crystalline phase; the water is forming dynamically coherent units with the macromolecules embedded and immersed in it.
What that implied is a high degree of coherence in the organism. In the book named after the fruitfly larva [1], The Rainbow and the Worm, The Physics of Organisms, first published in 1993 and now in its 3rd enlarged 2008 edition, I presented theoretical arguments and empirical evidence to support the idea that the organism is quantum coherent; and water plays the lead role in creating and maintaining the quantum coherence of organisms.
“Quantum jazz” is what I call the dynamic quantum coherence of organisms, and it is water’s quantum jazz through and through. Thanks to Jerry Pollack for inviting me to a Gordon Conference on water in 2004, and now Prof. Koruga for inviting me here to this conference, I have been able to indulge my love of water.
I am going to very quickly review some key evidence that has emerged especially within the past several years to support the idea that water’s quantum jazz is the basis of the living state. In other words, water’s quantum coherence is the basis of life. Despite that, however, life is still a big mystery, and at the end of my talk, I hope to pinpoint where exactly the mystery lies. Everything I am going to talk about is dealt with in more detail in my latest series on water [2] (Water’s Quantum Jazz series, SiS 48), that will be available in the next couple of weeks via our website, and later in our trendsetting quarterly magazine Science in Society, accompanied by fantastic artworks.
I shall present evidence that liquid water is quantum coherent at ambient conditions; that liquid water determines the activities of ions; that hydration water and macromolecules form one coherent dynamic unit; that hydration water energizes and electrifies DNA
And, water keeps almost all of the constituents of the cell dancing coherently most of the time. It keeps the quantum jazz going, day and night, to keep us alive and well.
A fully referenced version of this lecture plus power point presentation is available for download here
Article first published 15/09/10