Similarities between biological and crystal growth patterns

You may be forgiven if at first glance you mistook the picture in this post as a snowflake. The picture is only one of a whole range of bacterial growth patterns, and part of research being done by Eshel Ben-Jacob, a professor of physics at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

Professor Ben-Jacob is collaborating with colleagues at the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics at the University of California to determine how the growth of biological systems and colonies are influenced by different environmental stimuli. According to New Scientist: "In order to flourish in difficult living conditions the colony must adapt. This requires communication and cooperation from the individual microbes to organise the entire colony."

What immediately struck me as odd was the similarity between snowflakes and these colonial growth patterns. Whereas the petri dish pictures are the direct effect of different environmental influences on biological growth and diversification, the complex formations we can observe in snowflakes result from the interaction of water vapor and the environment.

Snowflakes grow in very cold environments as water vapor condenses directly to ice. While we do not fully understand the mechanisms responsible for the formation of snow crystals, recent research on the nature of water suggest that it has something to do with the behavior of electrons within the water molecule. These charged subatomic particles influence crystal formation and provide water with many of the characteristics that have baffled scientists for decades.

The link between the growth patterns and water can be found in research published by CU-Boulder physics Professor Noel Clark. According to an article in Science Daily they found that surprisingly short segments of DNA, life's molecular carrier of genetic information, could assemble into several distinct liquid crystal phases that "self-orient" parallel to one another and stack into columns when placed in a water solution. Life is widely believed to have emerged as segments of DNA- or RNA-like molecules in a prebiotic "soup" solution of ancient organic molecules.

(Images courtesy of Eshel Ben-Jacob and snowflakes.com)

The science of walking on fire

According to Wikipedia:

Walking on fire has existed for several thousand years, with records dating back to 1200 B.C.[3] Cultures across the globe, from Greece to China, used firewalking for rites of healing, initiation, and faith.[3] Firewalking became popular in America during the 1970s when author Tolly Burkan began a campaign to demystify the practice. He offered evening firewalking courses that were open to anyone in the general public.

Where firewalking used to belong to the realm of mystics and magic it suddenly became within the reach of anyone with the mental ability to change their perception. Those who have experienced it find it liberating and empowering to bear witness to the power of mind over matter, while those who witness it cannot help but stand in awe of a feat that defy logic in direct opposition to our instinct to survive.

Even though it is a practice that has been around since the time of Genesis, the actual physics that explain why people do not get burned during the experience can only be found in some very recent scientific discoveries about the nature of water. And while you may think that the molecular properties of something as common and important like water would be old news, fact is we have only recently begun to understand its nature.

Water has a highly crystallized structure, even when it is in a fluid state. , and this affinity to form crystal lattices is one of the main reasons why proteins all have a specific three dimensional structure. It is the structural variety of proteins that give them the ability to combine and interact with other proteins in what can almost be described as a molecular dance. A dance that expresses itself in the infinite variety of life that share our planet.

When protein molecules are exposed to increasing temperature, it is the collapse of the supporting water molecules that causes proteins to lose their structure, but water is also known to exhibit a period of latency between the time that it reaches boiling temperature and the time it eventually begins to boil. It is this natural ability of water that provide the scientific explanation why it is physically possible to walk on fire.

Thus the belief that the fire walkers express as part of the ritual of walking on fire seem to be translated to a force that allow water molecules to maintain their crystalline structure under the extreme duress of temperatures that can be as high as a thousand degrees centigrade. It also supports various other experimental findings that intention can influence the crystal structure of water, and bears testament to the incredible ability of human consciousness and the power of intention.

As much as what the eye can see…

How much would that be? In answer I guess most people would offer something that would depend on visual acuity, or the absence of visual obstruction. While it seems perfectly normal that what you see is what you percieve, quite the opposite is true.

A recent physics article in physorg.com explained it as follows:

This is a consequence of the eye's main characteristic, namely as a detection threshold. Below a certain threshold number of incoming photons, the eye remains blind (no light is seen), whereas above the threshold the efficiency (i.e. the probability of seeing) is close to one.

In their calculations, the authors also considered the influence of experimental imperfections, such as photon losses, which are inevitable in a real experiment. They found that the setup is surprisingly robust. A strong Bell violation can be obtained even in case of high losses, demonstrating the presence of entanglement. This is a very astonishing feature since entanglement is generally an extremely fragile property, highly sensitive to experimental imperfections such as losses.

I may have this wrong, but what I think it means is that our eye’s make things up, in this particular case it is photon’s, but it could be just about anything you see.

If you can imagine your perception as a flat screen TV in which there are increasingly more pixels dead, our perception of the degrading picture will remain as it was without any dead pixels.

But perception is not the only ability that can be influenced by entanglement? It also plays a role in something known as the placebo effect.

The story of water

Water is the most common molecule found on the earth, and at the same time also the most strange. Water is the only molecule that was created by the word of God, and while most people accept water for what it can do, very little ever give a second thought to what it does.

When I was in school someone used the example to illustrate how much power water has, by saying that it was the flow of water in rivers that will eventually erode all the rocks there are on earth and carry the sand back to the sea. When I did some research 30 years later I found a reference to something similar that explained how the expansive quality of water when it freezes is responsible for cracking open rocks and granite. Both examples are quite mind blowing in their scope, but they still do not even come close to the real power of water on our planet.

A very good example of what water does can be found in the way it provides the scaffolding for the structure of biological molecules, molecules like the proteins in DNA that are the building blocks of our human existence.

Proteins are also used as messengers across the complex hormonal networks in our bodies. It is the structural form of these proteins that determine what function they have, and that allow them to communicate across the various receptors that can be found throughout our bodies. Messengers that switch things off or on and regulate things like our immune system and memory.

Water is as much part of you and me as it is part of everything in nature. We can observe the way that it has formed our land, we experience it in the constant cycles of our weather patterns, we marvel at the infinite variety it expresses in every single snowflake, and we drink it to keep us alive.

Water is part of us and who we are.

Water is life.

What’s up with water anyhow?

Well, I guess we could start with the obvious:

1. It is commonly known as a fluid, and it is found in all three states of matter (solid, gas and fluid) all over planet earth. Funny that, because water is in fact the only molecule that naturally occurs in all three states of matter.

2. Water is formed by a chemical bond between the two elements, oxygen and hydrogen. Two elements of oxygen combine with one element of hydrogen to form one molecule of water.

3. It is found in everything around us, yes even the iron shovel you hold in your hand or the crystal you use for channeling your healing energy. In fact, it is the third most common molecule in the universe, besides hydrogen and carbon.

4. It is found within our bodies, and in very high percentages I hasten to ad! Especially if we look at some organs like the brain.

5. Thanks to the discovery of the microscope, we also know that when water turns into a solid it forms a tightly packed lattice of tetrahedral crystals.

6. A few years ago we found out that the pattern of tetrahedral clumping as water turn in to a solid could be influenced by intention and music. This mystical ability was discovered thanks to a very observant and very lucky scientist called Dr Emoto, who observed the phenomenon and intuited it’s causality.

7. We recently discovered that this tetrahedral quality persists when water turns into a fluid, and water seem to have a natural ability to combine together in tetrahedral clumps of up to a 100 molecules each. The rest of the molecules floats around freely and disorganized, sometimes in more and sometimes in less quantities.

8. We also found that the amount of free and disorganized water molecules depend on factors such as the temperature and pressure of the fluid, and the presence of other molecules that may be dissolved within it.

Before we discovered the tetrahedral clumping, water was considered to be the odd one out amongst molecules, with some 66 qualities that distinguished it from other forms of matter. With the theory of clumping we can now start to explain some of these differences in the behavior of water.

Things like why water can absorb so much heat before it starts to boil, and why the crystalline structure of frozen water is influenced by thought. This in turn explain how crystals work, and why they have their power.

It starts to explain such mysteries as the recent finding that happiness is contagious, that music can trigger an automatic emotional response, and it provides new theories to explain the hitherto mysterious way our brain seem to work.

By discovering the tetrahedral clumping nature of water we may just have hit upon the holy grail, and suddenly a whole world of knowledge start to make sense!

What’s up with water you ask? Apparently quite a lot. It begs me to tip my hat and wink a smile at glimpsing some understanding about mystery of life, the universe and just about everything…

Baby steps I know, but giant leaps for mankind.

The mood of water

Dr Emoto discovered that the crystalline structure of water changes according to what it was exposed to. It turns out that the crystals that water form when it freezes look beautiful after being exposed to love, and crappy after they are dosed with hate.

After two bottles of water are left overnight on a piece of paper, the crystals they form depend on the words we have written on the paper. The same happens when a group of people focus on love and sends it to a bottle of water, even if that bottle is locked in a safe on the other side of the globe, or when certain types of music is played to the water.

Which just goes to show that "Love, love changes everything...", and that you have to be mindful of water because 75% of our brain consists of water (99% if you go according to molecule count).