Click on the image above to go to “Connection” my book.

What has this to do with Health News you may ask?

After over forty years working in the healthcare profession and trying to discover what this thing we call “health”  is connected with I have concluded that it is infinitely more than what medicine is focused on, not all about “jabs” or pills, but it is connected with our body mechanics, our food intake, our breathing, our state of mind, our work, our community and, well almost everything including the cosmos! I explain all this in a more practical way in a book I published a decade ago called “Connection” – Towards a broader understanding of health in medicine. The link with the cosmos is found in the last chapter of this small book and challenges the accepted view that it all began with a Big Bang! Below is a summary of the thinking leading to this view that you may find interesting. Like Einstein who often did “Mind experiments” you too can try this mind experiment yourself!

The Informed Universe

The concept is in the word! In-Form i.e. to create form, the basic character that identifies every material thing in the universe, from the smallest particle to the grandest constellation.

Perhaps information is the ultimate essence of the universe?

We are used to Einstein’s great equation: E = MC2,  mass x (the speed of light) x (the speed of light) where a small amount of matter is equivalent to a vast amount of energy.

Consider another equation for a moment: I = EC2, where a small amount of energy is equivalent to a vast amount of information. The C in this equation may not be the speed of light as in Einstein’s equation but some other number of similar magnitude, the precise value is not as important as the idea of this potential conversion.

Now we are ready to do a “mind experiment”.
Imagine starting with our universe composed of matter, energy, and information.

Imagine converting all the matter in the entire universe into just energy added to all the energy already there would give us a universe of just energy.

E = MC2 + E (total present)

Now imagine converting all this energy into information added to the information there already.

I = EC2 + I  (total present)

We now have a universe composed only of information.

Information or pattern needs no time or space to exist, if you doubt this, again imagine an equilateral triangle perhaps with sides of a few centimeters, make it smaller and smaller in your mind’s eye until it is just a point. Then expand it to as large as you want – it is still there. A point has no dimension or dimension “0”, thus the total information of a transformed universe could occupy no space in no time.

This is an alternative view of “The Big Bang”, the “Zero Point ”

The Learning Universe

All living things create more complex forms or patterns from simpler forms, as when we convert the vegetable food we eat into our physical bodies, this is the same with the simplest of living things. Even the formation of snowflakes or other crystals from liquids could be seen as increasing patterns or information. Does the death of an animal or any living creature leads to a loss of pattern or information, or is this enduring and adding to the total information in the universe? The information that remains is the processes that were a part of the living creature. We all add to the universal information living our lives.

Any Living Thing = Matter + Energy + Information
Compare this with the Universe = Matter + Energy + Information

Only information is enduring in both.

Perhaps there was no “Big Bang” but a “Zero Point” a “0” from which unfolded first information to in-form energy followed by all the in-formed material including all life forms.

What this Zero Point could be will depend on your persuasion, is it the ancient Brahman Vishnu beginning from a formless concept that can unfold into the universe we perceive and return repeatedly to the start, or the story of Genesis for Christians from a dark formless void, or the Pangu myth of emergence from a big black egg with the unfolding of Yin and Yang, or the Greek creation myth formed from Chaos or for some The Mind of God or simply the Unknowable given Man’s limitations.

There is much common ground between all creation myths perhaps because we have all been immersed in the same pool of information from the beginnings of life on earth.

There is a question that some will ask; how can something arise from nothing?
An analogy that helps with this tough question is found in the recent understanding of matter and anti-matter or visualize a reflection of say a hand having, one being matter and the other anti-matter when they come together perfectly matched they are transformed into energy and then into information in a zero point. This is very much akin to the Yin and Yang of eastern thinking, the two opposites up and down, night and day, male and female.

Testing This Hypothesis

DNA and Information

Whether we consider a simple plant or a more complex animal it is not an unreasonable question to ask, “How can a package of amino acids in the DNA be sufficient to give the form of any living thing?” Perhaps therefore the DNA has two attributes:

First. It does give the information for the materials to be used in the living organism; the kind of cells in each part, the colouring, the functions, etc.
Second. It carries with it or connects with the essential design information associated with the particular organism. This information is universal and is added to by every generation of the organism. This is just a part of the total learning process of the whole universe.

We can accept the first concept, as this is based on current thinking in genetics. How though could the second concept be explained or tested?

One way of explaining this information or design transfer would be to regard the DNA to be like a finely tuned aerial that picks up the specific radiations associated with the specific organism. Another way would be to see all this information being attached to the material and energetic form of the DNA. A third way might be a combination of the two.

Testing these concepts:

If the information is carried along with the material DNA and accepting the above concept of interchange of energy and information, it might be possible to measure the very small increase in energy that should occur when viable living DNA is made non-viable by radiation, etc.

Viable living material will have mass, energy, and information.
Non-viable will have mass and energy and less information.
By measuring the equivalent energy before and after, any increase would be due to the conversion of information to energy plus the energy applied to “kill” the material.

To test whether the information was received from the environment it would mean finding some means of shielding the living material from such radiated information. If light is the carrier of more than just energy for photosynthesis, then we may have been misinterpreting the entire failure to thrive, of plants deprived of sunlight. Some may be due to inadequate information for development. There may be other forms of radiation we are as yet unaware of that are the main carriers of such information.