A conversation between Dharma Bernardi and Paolo Renati about the synchronizing-metronomes video, coherence and biological resonance (length 26:44).
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Why the metronomes synchronize
Dharma: This video received so many views and comments from all over the world, and today we’re going to explain in a little more detail how this synchronization works. What does coherence mean? And why was this video shared with the title “Biological Resonance”? It’s a question that will lead us to discuss what this phenomenon implies for living organisms.
Paolo: Yes. In this video we saw the spontaneous synchronization of oscillators, which in this case are represented by pendulums. Of course, it is a metaphor for many other kinds of systems. What makes it interesting in the biological context is the biological resonance that occurs between molecules and makes biological functioning possible – a functioning that is, of course, not random. And this is true even though much of mainstream scientific culture is still stuck in the idea that molecules are subject to thermal fluctuations and stochastic interactions.
But let’s focus for a moment on this very simple system, which is just a metaphor for much more complex ones. Is there a trick? We could say yes and no, in the sense that, to display such behavior, the system needs certain boundary conditions. The boundary condition is that the oscillators must be able to feel one another. This is possible because the platform on which they are placed, and on which they oscillate, is floating: it can move along the degree of freedom parallel to the direction of oscillation.
So what does this allow to emerge? Because the platform is not rigidly fixed to the ground, the pendulums can transfer momentum and energy to one another. This is the metaphor for something that exists in condensed matter and that the approximation of quantum mechanics does not conceive.
Let me explain it better. In quantum mechanics, according to the von Neumann approximation, the ground state of the oscillators is unique – there is only one. So the interaction between the vacuum and the oscillators can only be treated perturbatively, and this corresponds to pendulums placed on a fixed platform. But this is not the realistic condition of quanta in condensed matter. The realistic picture is given by quantum field theory, which is a theory of many vacua and the only one able to explain phase transitions and spontaneous symmetry breaking.
What it essentially says is this: once the coupling between the oscillators (the pendulums) and the vacuum (the floor) is strong enough, and the vacuum is able to change – that is, the floor can be perturbed by the motion of the pendulums – the system spontaneously switches to a thermodynamically much more favorable state, in which the oscillations are synchronized. The oscillators are synchronized not only with each other but also with the motion of the platform. In biological systems, this means that the oscillation is synchronized among the molecules and with the electromagnetic field that has arisen from the vacuum.
This is what happens in water coherence domains. Thanks to their coupling with vacuum excitations, many water molecules are able to oscillate in phase and create a new, holistic entity on a larger scale, called a coherence domain. This is possible only because the vacuum level of the molecules changes: from the level of the isolated molecules it drops to a lower level for the coherent ones. And this shows exactly how the emergence of order – if coupling with the vacuum is allowed and the system is thermodynamically open – is something favored, something spontaneous.
The difference between the disordered ground state and the ordered one is called the energy gap in quantum electrodynamics. It expresses exactly how much energy you would have to spend to drive the oscillators out of coherence.
So, to close: this is a very nice and simple example that shows us how physics actually works. If you isolate the system – isolate the oscillators, an operation we can mimic by fixing the platform – you will never be able to contemplate the switch toward an ordered condition. But if you consider the realistic situation, which is always a dialogue, always a relationship, always an openness, you see the spontaneous emergence of order and the breaking of a certain symmetry.
This is very important, because it shows us that the approximations usually made in quantum mechanics completely prevent us from seeing this kind of “runaway”: the runaway from the perturbative, disordered ground state to a much more stable, coherent ground state. So the true theory able to describe reality is necessarily one that can contemplate many vacua and open systems made of a large number of oscillators.
Once the metronomes are synchronized, they form a coherence domain. Staying within the metaphor, if we tried to act on them, it would be as if we could only touch the platform: we would be facing the new whole system that has been created, not the single oscillators. As they say, the forest is much more than the sum of its trees.
Dharma: Mhm. So they start oscillating as a whole, as one. And what you’re pointing out here is that biological systems too – living organisms – emerge from such coherence.
Coherence in water and in living matter (~7:10)
Paolo: This kind of coherence emerges thanks to very small energy perturbations of the single oscillator, known as the Lamb shift. But this small energy shift is not linear in the number of oscillators: it is not proportional just to N, but to N√N. This means that as the number of oscillators increases…
Dharma: Mhm.
Paolo: …at a certain point the energy you spend to set them in motion becomes smaller than the energy you save by synchronizing them. This is a sort of critical density threshold: once the temperature is below a certain value, the condition is met for the phase transition to occur and the coherence domain to form.
This happens with water molecules, but also with proteins, ions and many other kinds of molecules, at several scales. You can have synchronization of dipole stretching, of dipole rotations, of the ortho and para configurations of the two hydrogen spins. You can have coherence among ions, coherence in the oscillations of microtubules and membranes, and many other things.
It is very important to understand that, to build a truthful quantum biology – and a truthful understanding of biochemistry and physiology – we cannot neglect the role of water, because water, this coherent condensate, makes up at least 99% of the molecules of living matter. Until now, biochemistry has believed in something like magic. How is it possible, for instance, that complex processes like a single Krebs cycle in a cell occur with such efficiency, order and speed? It’s because they are catalyzed. There is an orchestra – like a jazz band, as Mae-Wan Ho once said – in which sharing the same phase is the condition through which everyone can feel everyone else, non-locally. That’s why you have the emergence of the self: the creation of a new identity that is not reducible to the sum of the oscillators at the lower level.
Dharma: And this also explains why we cannot look at diseases and health issues through the lens of an error. Because if everything is synchronized, how can something be out of phase?
Disease, biological sense and the self (~10:10)
Paolo: Thank you for the question. Some people accept that coherence is the condition of living matter, and conclude that disease is therefore the loss of coherence.
Paolo: Actually, this is not exactly the point. A living system, a coherent system, is a self: a system that experiences its environment, which means it is coupled with it thermodynamically and electrodynamically. Of course, there may be conditions and stimuli that strengthen and sustain your coherence. This is exactly what produces, in the feeling of the biological system, the perception “I’m fine here, I’m satisfied, my needs are fulfilled.” But there are also other stimuli and conditions that deplete coherence and threaten it. So what happens in the second case? Something threatens and weakens my coherence.
Dharma: Yes.
Paolo: This is the consequence of the environment, of the damage the environment has caused. But as long as coherence – a super-coherence – is still in force, because coherence is the thermodynamically most favorable condition, the coherence that remains in the damaged system is the condition for starting the recovery and healing process and for repairing any damage.
Paolo: And the extraordinary thing is that the way coherence has been broken writes into the system exactly the states that are the perfect starting point to repair it, according to the way it was compromised. If a tissue is damaged, your coherence changes in exactly the way that organizes all the processes needed to repair or strengthen that tissue.
Paolo: Or, if the problem is that you are not able to detect food or detect an enemy, and your homeostasis – that is, your coherence – is threatened in this sense, then the change in coherence is exactly the kind of state needed to set in motion all the processes that help you improve in those specific aspects.
Paolo: That’s why we can speak of “biological sense.” It is not an invention; it becomes obvious once you look at how physics works in a super-coherent system such as a biological one.
Dharma: Right. Because when a system is no longer coherent, each of the single metronomes, in this case, just starts to go at its own rhythm. So if something is not coherent with us, it actually no longer exists within us, because what I am – what the self is – is a coherence. So nothing of the self can be outside coherence. That’s what you’re saying.
Paolo: Exactly. The self, as you rightly said, is not an entity. The self is the dynamics itself: the flow, the organized flow of processes. This is what you perceive from the inside as a self, and it is what guarantees the continuity of the biological organism – which, as you know perfectly well, keeps changing its oscillators, molecules and energy. It is like a river: everything is continuously exchanged. You don’t have the same molecules you had when you were born. Yet, although your energy and matter change completely, you have continuity.
Paolo: A continuity given by how you respond to the world, which is not fixed either. Nothing is fixed, but there is continuity, because each state you realize depends on what you have experienced before, and also on your needs, your telos, your aims. This is why the expression “biological meaning” – or “biological sense”, I’m not sure which is better – is so effective: it embraces both the causes that come from the past and the finality toward which you, like any living system, are necessarily directed, because your coherence tends to be maintained as fully and as long as possible.
So this is the point. Disease is not the damage, and certainly not the responses to it, but the continuous exposure to conditions that keep requiring these special recovery operations. The continuous engagement of coping responses is something that exhausts the system and leaves, you know, scars in it.
Let me try to remember if I’ve forgotten anything…
Dharma: Yeah, maybe we can look at some of the comments and see if there are questions that haven’t been answered yet.
Viewers’ comments: stability and resonance among people (~15:55)
Paolo: So, I could say this. I read some comments, and people think this state wouldn’t last long. Actually, this is not correct, because the new coherent – the new synchronized – state is much more stable, if we neglect friction. If we think of metronomes on a platform that is free to oscillate, they will synchronize within a few seconds. And if you maintain these boundary conditions – keeping the coupling, keeping the vacuum, keeping the floor mobile – you will maintain this situation forever, within the limits of friction, because the pendulums gradually lose energy to friction. But at the level of molecules, where energy is perfectly conserved because every process is purely elastic, at least in this kind of transition, this oscillation is guaranteed. It can be compromised only by breaking the conditions: for instance, if the temperature is too high, there is too much noise, which drives the system out of synchrony; or if the density drops, there are too few molecules to sustain the self-built, self-trapped field.
In fact, we could see that if you take the floating floor off its mobile supports and put it on the fixed ground, within a few seconds the metronomes begin to go out of phase. But if they are still moving with enough amplitude and you put them back on the floating floor, they resynchronize. This is not a metastable state. It is a stable state, because it is thermodynamically chosen.
Dharma: And then there’s this comment, from someone who actually understood the principle.
Paolo: This is a point worth mentioning, and it is true: when you go beyond the system’s capacity to bear the oscillation – if the amplitude is too large, as we showed with the oscillating levitating droplets in the video we made – you enter a nonlinear regime and everything breaks up. But in the case of water coherence domains this cannot happen, because the amplitude of the self-field – the agent that guarantees coherence – is exactly commensurate with the number of molecules involved and with the energy distance between the two levels between which coherence, that is, the oscillation, takes place. We also have to remember that systems never have just one frequency as a proper mode. They have many: they have harmonics, many frequencies that can be matched.
Dharma: (reading a comment) “That’s how it is in life. People go in different directions, but you can direct your energy into the rhythm of peace and friendship across the planet, and it would be paradise in the literal sense.”
Paolo: We deeply agree with this sentence – not in a spiritual sense: it is exactly what could happen in humanity, in its possibility to synergize.
Dharma: It already happens. It’s not something that could happen, because every system, every relationship, is already an oscillating together, whatever the color and flavor of your relationships. This happens especially in family systems, even though it’s not always possible to see it directly: we oscillate with our family members, and there are precise generational patterns that we follow. So, thank you for this comment.
The platform, circular causality and closing (~19:55)
Paolo: Yes, I was saying that it’s very nice, because if people understand how life works, more and more of them can resonate together on a different approach to the education of our children, to the organization of the economy, of work, of society. This would create a thriving community – a resonating coherence domain, healthily coupled with nature, with biological systems, with the whole biosphere – instead of something apart, a system in competition with the dynamics of nature…
Dharma: …of life. Yeah.
So, a lot of people are still commenting that it’s because of the platform they’re mounted on: if the platform were static, there would be no synchronization. And this is actually the point, because nothing in life is static.
Paolo: Yes, yes. Some people, by writing this kind of sentence, may think: “Ah, I’ve debunked the phenomenon.” But this is exactly the condition necessary for such a transition. And, as we said and we repeat, this is exactly the condition actually experienced by quantum oscillators in physical systems, and in biological ones too.
Dharma: Okay. So we have another interesting comment, which says: “The platform takes control, forcing everyone to obey” – as if it were the platform controlling the movement. Would you say it is rather the relationship between all the metronomes and the platform?
Paolo: Actually, this is a very nice example of circular causality. The metronomes feel each other precisely because, through the mobile platform, a metronome can transmit its own oscillation to its neighbor. In a certain sense, of course, the neighbor is forced by the platform, but only because the platform is receiving momentum from the other metronomes. This is exactly the point. Water molecules, if they are dense enough, are gradually compelled to oscillate in phase by the ground state – that is, by the electromagnetic field coupled to them, which cannot be anything but coherent, and which therefore forces the molecules to be in tune.
Dharma: Right. It’s like asking: does the individual make the system, or does the system make the individuals?
Paolo: Correct, thank you for the metaphor. Yes, as in mass behavior: the behavior of the masses is of course a consequence of the single individuals, but at the same time the behavior of individuals is changed by the fact that they belong to and take part in a collective. This is exactly the complete, circular causality that tells us that bottom-up and top-down actions are at work at the same time.
Dharma: Yes.
Paolo: And this is a very important aspect, because it tells us that, to find the causes of something, it is not a given that you should dig down to the microscopic level. The behavior of the masses cannot necessarily be explained by the behavior of single individuals – just as the cause of traffic is not in the car itself. Epistemologically, this is a very important point. In the life sciences – biochemistry, biology, physiology, molecular biology – we should learn that the causes of the processes and phenomena we observe cannot be found simply by zooming into the microscopic. We should look for them in the relationships, in the coupling of the system with its environment. Traffic in a city cannot be explained by looking at the engines or the tires of the cars; it can only be understood by looking at the relationships between the cars, between them and the topology of the roads they move along, the timing, and many other factors.
Dharma: Mhm. So it’s the same in biological systems, where this kind of approach is even more important. There’s no single leader, no chief; it’s the relationship between…
Paolo: It’s a self-emerging orchestra, like a jazz band with no conductor, where the music emerges from the interplay. It’s enough for the musicians to share the same phase – that is, to play in time.
Dharma: Uh-huh. (reading a comment) “Be careful how you choose your friends.” Well, actually, you don’t choose your friends. You already oscillate with somebody; you already come into resonance with somebody, and that’s how you are actually able to see them, to know them. So this comes before you become friends.
Paolo: You choose very little in your life. You resonate, you feel, and you are driven by the things that match you.
Okay, so I think we’ve read the main comments. I think our explanation contains enough elements and hints for people to understand what is happening there, and why this toy model was presented: because it represents much more meaningful and precious dynamics on which life is based. I hope everybody now understands things better and has a new way of looking at them – not thinking that there’s a trick, or that it’s just a fake. This is exactly how dynamics works. And if each of us learns to look at life in this way, I think a big revolution would happen.
Dharma: I agree. I agree. Thank you so much.
Paolo: Thank you.
Dharma: Thank you, and see you next time.
Paolo: See you next time.
