EnergeticLeo
Member
- Ray on intro to this whole energy-structure worldview
View: https://youtu.be/T6NvwqEE8Is?t=273- Proteins: the basic substance of life
- They are acidic, which means electron withdrawing and proton releasing, because of the high content of oxygen atoms on the polymers (proteins)
- This creates a pre-existing deficit of electrons
- Being acidic means the substance is already inclined towards oxidation (deficit of electrons)
- Jeremy England at MIT is working out the basic physical principles of how a flow of energy e.g. shining light on simple molecules, creates order
- The flow of energy is an energy disequilibrium
- The flow of energy itself in a polymer solution created by two points having different electron affinity (one acceptor, one donor), will cause the proteins to align according to the energy flow
- Ray’s experiment that convinced himself that this was a simple process was to attach two electrodes to an eggshell, and measure the current flow and resistance as the voltage rises and the same as the voltage falls
- He found a very strong hysteresis loop; on the falling voltage the flow of electrons was out of proportion to the voltage - they flowed relatively easily, because as the voltage increased it created a conductive channel in the proteins, which persisted for some time even after the voltage started dropping
- ‘Walking makes the road, basically’
- Whenever you have energy flowing, you make the paths easier for the next flow of energy - it increases the ‘appetite’ and ‘capacity’ of the system to use energy
- The more complex a system gets in response to a flow of energy, the faster it gets more complex yet
- Vernadsky 100 years ago, worked out the implications of this: the sun as a source of energy flowing through substance created order; continuing the flow spontaneously leads to a higher and higher metabolic rate - the more electrons it can conduct per second - as a consequence of that, you get a more complex system e.g. a bigger brain, which creates and maintains that higher metabolic rate
- Almost at the same time there were two or three people working out the medical, biological and developmental implications of this in a very practical way: Frederick Koch, Otto Warburg, and Albert Szent-Gyorgyi; they were all seeing the creation of the respiring organism as developing and progressing through the use of oxygen; they saw that when you block this use, you revert to a ‘slime’ metabolism - a very primitive ancient, under-organised way of using energy; all three of them saw cancer as using a primitive pre-oxidative metabolism
- More or less overlapping with their studies, there were studies looking at the implications of CO2 as the product of this oxidative metabolism and the extraction of electrons from fuel
- Thinking of things in mechanistic terms, the tendency is to not notice that the CO2 itself is acidic - the common theory of acid is the proton donor theory of acidity - but CO2 is an acid in the electron withdrawing sense of being an acid - CO2 is a lewis acid, because it has two oxygen atoms on one carbon - very strong electron binder
- As soon as CO2 sits on a protein, the electrons in the protein shift towards the CO2, intensifying the overall acidity and hence tendency to oxidise and withdraw electrons
- Hence when you use oxygen to make ATP, and produce CO2, it intensifies the respiratory process that created it in the first place
- ‘The more you breathe the more able you are to breathe, in effect’
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