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Introduction and Physical Background  Biological Impacts and Consciousness Research

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In closed systems only at rather high temperatures do enough thermal photons of suitable quantum energy Ea (in the optical range) become available for chemical reactivity. The sun or  high-temperature lamps are examples. At physiological temperatures in living systems the amount of thermal photons would be several orders of magnitude too small to explain the rather high reaction rate of 10⁵ reactions per second and per cell (Popp, 1998a) ³.
Actually, we do measure in living matter 
(1)  several orders of magnitude higher photon intensities („biophotons„)  than in closed systems at physiological temperatures (Fig.3),
(2)  distinct deviations from a thermal system in such a way that it is not possible to assign a constant temperature to the photon density  in the optical range from at least 200 to 800 nm (Fig.3).
 

Fig.3  The measurements of biophotons show that the spectral intensity in the range from  200 to 800  nm is orders of magnitude higher than expected from thermal photon emission.  If one displays instead of spectral intensity the excitation temperature q(e) which corresponds to the temperature of a closed system of just the same spectral intensity of photons as the actually registered one, it turns out that biophoton emission is governed by the law q(e)µ e  (upper Fig. 3).  The q-values are much higher than the physiological temperature. This means that the biophoton field is certainly not heat radiation. Rather,  this field stabilizes far from thermal equilibrium  It corresponds to a system where phase space cells are occupied with the same probability, taking the absolute highest possible value of entropy (lower Fig. 3, upper curve). This distribution is far from the Boltzmann distribution of a closed system (lower Fig.3, lower curve).

These remarkable features which are nowadays generally accepted (since they have been confirmed in all the laboratories that perform biophoton measurements (Chang, Fisch, and Popp, 1998 ⁴) throw a completely new light onto the understanding of living systems.
First, it is evident that the metabolic activity in animated matter is governed by biophotons since they (and only they) can be responsible for the triggering of all the necessary transition state complexes with activation energies in the optical range. Heat photons would never suffice to provide the necessary activation energy. Even enzymatic reactions cannot take place without this activation by suitable photons. 
Second, it is clear that this regulation principle is not based on a chaotic energy distribution such as thermal equilibrium but has the capacity of controlling the biological functions at the right time in the right position. 
This does, by the way, not require extremely high photon numbers. Since after a small reaction time of about 10^-9 seconds the activating photon is not thermalized but available for the next reaction (Cilento, 1988)⁵, one photon can trigger at most 10⁹ reactions per second, provided that it always dirigates the activation of the transition state at the right time in the right place.
This is not just a question of energy or photon number, but of the information that is necessary to distribute the available energy in the right way. It belongs to the most fascinating problems of biophoton research to find out in what way biophotons dirigate the biological functions. 
A first approach to answering this question is to look at the entropy in living systems. One expects that the "order" of living matter is higher the lower the entropy. But how do we achieve this at low energy if the maximum of entropy is the essential governing law of macroscopic dynamics? In order to solve this problem one has to remember that the maximum of entropy in closed systems is achieved under the rather strong constraint of energy conservation law. What happens if we cancel this constraint? And what does it mean to cancel this condition? The answers are quite important for understanding "life". As soon as a closed system is not confined to energy conservation the thermodynamical probability (or the entropy) becomes higher. It then takes its maximum if, and only if, all the available quantum states are occupied with just the same probability instead of following the Boltzmann distribution. Hence, instead of the exponential decrease of photon number with increasing activation energy, all the different energy levels contain the same number of photons. With the exception of small deviations, this is just the measured spectral distribution of biophotons (lower Fig. 3, upper curve). Consequently, we have reason to trace this experimental fact back to the case where the confinement to the energy conservation law is abandoned. At the same time, the lack of energy conservation means simply that the same amount of biophotons that flows out is not always compensated by the influx of the same number of photons. Rather, there is always enough energy available for the creation or availability of biophotons providing then a permanent continous photon current from living matter. Actually, this is quite obvious.
But instead of approaching a state of low entropy we arrive now at a state where the entropy has its absolute maximum even at higher values than in comparable closed systems of the same energy content. How do we explain this apparent contradiction? 
At least we are now sure that this state of highest possible entropy does not violate the maximum entropy principle. 
Even so, the way to arrive at rather low entropy, which may theoretically take the lowest value 0, is simply what physicists call Bose condensation. As soon as very small cooperative interactions between the quantum states of the whole system come up, the photon gas becomes "frozen" on account of a dramatic reduction of the degrees of freedom. An extreme limit of this process is represented by a system with only one degree of freedom. It displays the entropy 0 which - and this is the puzzling result - takes even furthermore the formal maximum (!) value under the actual boundary conditions. The absolute value 0 and the entropy maximum thereby do not contradict each other. Rather, they do not violate the second law of thermodynamics at all. These circumstances constitute what I call an "ideal open" system. At the same time, this system has the highest possible sensitivity since smallest amounts of energy uptake or removal may induce dramatic changes of entropy in terms of the corresponding increase or decrease of the number of degrees of freedom. Fig. 4 displays this situation.
 

Fig. 4. Compared to the entropy S of a closed system (dotted line), the entropy S of a living system (continous line) at constant energy E is rather variable. The entropy of animated matter is always an absolute maximum, where only the number F of degrees of freedom changes between complete separation (where the entropy is even higher than for the case of thermal equilibrium) and complete coupling (where the entropy can take even the value 0).

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