Physics Summer 2017

I know I am a living system because I have a will to live. It is a miracle to be alive. The odds of any of us being here are incredibly small. I believe that children choose their parents; they choose to be conceived and to be born into this world. We do not know where it all will lead, but we take a leap to live this life. I am a living system because a spark, the coming together of light and sound, created me. I have the will to keep becoming, changing, adapting and creating. It seems silly to me to try to isolate biology, physiology, health, and physics. Biophysics is integrative and allows one to widen their gaze within the scientific framework. I think it’s very appropriate to engage with biophysics as Chinese medicine practitioners. It can provide a framework and language to articulate some of the more intuitive aspects of a system of holistic care to the western audience, including ourselves! I have experienced amazing results from Chinese medicine as a patient, with no exp...

My E-Prime Day This morning I awoke at 7am, according to the widely agreed upon concept of time in San Francisco, CA. I poured water into a kettle and turned the dial on the stove until a flame ignited on the burner. When the kettle made a noise that I call a whistle, I turned the dial to discontinue the gas supply to the flame. I removed jars filled with dry herbs from a kitchen cabinet and added them to a vessel with the hot water to make tea.   I ate food. I walked outside of the building and down the street. I stopped walking at the space on the street marked by signs as a bus stop. When a bus marked 30 stopped next to the curb and the doors opened, I stepped up onto the bus and sat down in a seat that did not contain a human. I removed the notes I took in Physiology from the bag I bought with me and read about the respiratory system in the human body.   When the bus stopped and the doors opened at my intended destination, I departed from the vehicle and walked to t...

Synchronicity is “the coincidence in time of two or more casually unrelated events which have the same meaning” ("Carl Jung") . This description of synchronicity was given by psychologist Carl Jung to describe occurrences such as: having a thought about someone you have not spoken to in years, and then minutes later running into them on the street.   The characteristics of a synchronous event are that there is a “meaningful connection between the outer event and the person’s inner psychological state,” and this connection is without a causal connection (“Carl Jung”).  This question of causality is what defines Jung’s phenomenon of synchronicity as a Western concept. Jung describes a patient who was “psychologically inaccessible” due to her “extremely Cartesian rationalism” (“Carl Jung”).   This patient held a prevailing tenant of Western thought, Rene Descartes’ concept of dualism, which holds that the mind/soul and the body are two separate entities ( "Cartesia...

Newton's Laws and me: Newton’s first law states that a force must be applied to change the state of an object. An object in motion will remain in motion at a constant speed and velocity unless acted on by a force. An object at rest will remain at rest until acted upon by a force. A force must be applied to change the trajectory. I relate to this when I think of how it is I bring myself to change my state of being. I sometimes use stress to motivate be to change my state and become more productive with schoolwork. Emotions feel like a force that is acting on me to get me to change my speed or direction. The second law states that acceleration in directly proportional to the force applied to the object and inversely proportional to the mass of the object. I relate to this when I think of how much more difficult it is to get started on a large project versus a small task. Or how much more force it takes to get a group of people to do an activity together than to rally one or ...

I know ordered chaos well! Once upon a time it was my security blanket. I remember my room as a young teenager was ordered chaos indeed. There were objects strewn everywhere! And yet, I knew exactly where each item was. When I returned home, I would know if someone had walked into my room and exactly what path they took, because I noticed which objects were slightly out of place. I am happy to say I am much tidier now (thanks, Marie Kondo!) and do not obsess over belongings. It’s interesting that we couldn’t come up with chaos theory until we had computers to run equation after equation for hours at a time. And as processing capability became more powerful, artificial intelligence emerged. As fractals are the “picture of chaos,” and our body, mind and heart are fractal, perhaps the endless fractal pattern is what consciousness emerges from, thus consciousness from chaos.  This article discusses the details of the fractal nature of our body mind and heart and our reactio...