I'm extremely pleased to introduce Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. And I'll say this, for science to progress, we need new ideas. About half of the scientists in the world, hate new ideas. We also need to reexamine ideas that everybody agrees are true, and some of those ideas are mouldy, and have to be looked at again. Dr. Sheldrake has been a pioneer in both departments, and his work means a lot to me. The origin of biological form, to me is the most important unsolved mystery in science. Dr. Sheldrake has a brilliant idea about how form is created. And I'm going to talk about how it works in a couple of days. So without further ado, Dr. Sheldrake. Thank you. Well, thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here, partly because I think this water conference is a model of what scientific conferences could be, open minded, broad based, and inclusive. Also because Jerry Pollack, who's such an inspiration for all of us, corresponds so closely to my ideal scientist. When I was a child and wanted to be a scientist, I thought that all scientists would be like Jerry Pollack, and open minded, curious, and unpompous. And I soon discovered that actually, there aren't very many Jerry Pollocks. in fact, there's only one. so anyway, I'm very pleased to be here. And what I'm talking about this morning, is something I've never talked about before, namely water. Because it's a water conference, and I have, over the years, done some research involving water. So this is what I'm going to be talking about now is something none of you would have had before, because I haven't done it before. Of course, I'll touch on various themes that are familiar to you. And one of them is vibratory patterns in water. I think one of the problems within the sciences in general, is that in the 1950s, when analog computers and digital computers were both viable options, everything went down the digital computing route. And that's given us many benefits. But analog computers, model processes by creating processes, rather than trying to break them down into yes and no bits, and then kind of reconstruct them, from granular atomistic elements. And analog computing provides models of nature, which are actually much easier to understand, and in many cases much more appropriate than digital computing. And this is often true of phenomena, and processes involving waves. We now know that wave phenomena lie at the very heart of matter. Quantum physics is all about waves, and wave patterns. And you can, of course, model those to some degree with equations. But the more complex, the wave patterns, the more difficult the modelling becomes. But you can also model them with waves themselves. And the reason I'm so interested in modelling with waves, is because I think that the underlying processes in morphogenesis, in chemistry molecules, crystals, and biology are to do with what I call morphic genetic fields. And these are basically vibratory fields of activity, that wavelike, and rhythmic. So one way into understanding patterns of vibration, is through analog model systems. And vibratory patterns were first studied, well, Leonardo da Vinci was one of the first to observe, that when you vibrated piles of dust, they formed patterns. and Chladni, who did the classic work on extraordinary patterns, on vibrating plates, showed that if you vibrate a plate, you have particles on it like pollen, or spores, or sand, then the patterns are formed as it lines up on the nodes of the vibratory patterns. And here's a whole series of patents on vibratory plates, showing how form arises from frequency. These particular patterns were produced by Alexander Lartabarcer. Now, Michael Faraday was very interested in these patterns, and he was a very curious and open minded scientist. And he started looking at them in water. And Faraday discovered that if you vibrate water, you get patterns on the surface, ripples. And if you have sloping edges to the container, these ripples fade out like waves breaking on a beach, a sandy beach. If you have vertical walls of the container, they're reflected, and you get standing wave patterns, and these standing wave patterns are called Faraday waves, after Faraday. Well, it's now possible to study these with a precision never before possible, thanks to the development of the cymascope, by John Stuart Reid, who's here at this conference. And my son Merlin, that I, have got a Cymascope laboratory at our home in London, and there it is. The cymascope's in the middle. It contains it has a coil that vibrates up and down. And there's a small container here about two centimeters in diameter, with a small volume of fluid. And there's a camera, and here's a light ring, that illuminates it. And in this you can control the frequency, and the amplitude, and and do repeatable experiments. This shows you the kind of pattern you get. You see, that was a three fold pattern with standing waves, that oscillate backwards and forwards. So it gives you a six fold pattern altogether. This is another one. This is an eight fold pattern. And by vibrating at different frequencies, you get a series of patterns six fold, eight fold, ten fold, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, and it goes up further. So there are these symmetry patterns and these are, as it were, resonant frequencies that appear. When you go up through the spectrum, oh, this is this one shows, this is a composite, which is what you get if you take exposures fairly, unless you have very quick exposures. With very, very quick exposures, you can see, this is an alternation, between this pattern and this pattern. This is an alternation between this and this. And so what you're seeing normally is the composite. We went up through an entire spectrum, from 50 to 200 hertz. And you get ranges, these are replicates, these three lines, and you get periods when there's no pattern. And then you get into an area where you get a particular pattern, and then you get into no pattern again. It's a bit like old fashioned radios where you tune the radio set, and you get a station, and then there's a kind of noise in between, and then you get the next station. So you come in and out of these resonant frequencies. And they show an order, as you go up from the bottom here, six, eight, four, ten, six, twelve, eight, though it doesn't seem to have any logical sequence. But when you plot them on a graph, you see a very distinct series of patterns. This is increasing frequency here, from 50 to 200 hertz. And this is the foldness of the pattern, with three replicates six, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen's missing, sixteen, eighteen, twenty. Then it all starts over again. Six, eight, ten, twelve, and then again. So you see we have these harmonic frequencies. The only way of modelling these mathematically, seems to be using Bessel functions, which are really those are like vibrating drum membranes. So there's an order in all this, which is what you'd expect really, with waves and patterns. When we look at the more detailed patterns, we find that these are like basins of attraction. This is frequency. These are the patterns that we get at these frequencies. And this is the amplitude needed, minimum amplitude needed to create the pattern. And this is like an attractor a well. And there's a period point here where you get the pattern very clearly, with a minimum of energy, and there's an area around it where these patterns you get have to have more energy to make them happen. This is a resonance pattern. And if you look at the vibrations at these bits in between, what you see is something on the cusp, it's what chaos mathematicians call a chaotic pattern, where it's drawn between two attractors. So this is at the cusp between two of those patterns. Well, you've got the idea, in between there's this kind of inside unstable area. One of the people who has done most research on this, in relation to biological forms, is Alexander Lartabarcer, here in Germany. And what he's shown is that these radially symmetrical patterns that you get from vibrating water, have distinct analogs in biological forms, like flowers. And they also have analogs in radially symmetrical structures. These are pollen grains, each of these are from different species, and each species has a particular pattern of the pollen grain. These are single cells. And why this is important is that current thinking about biological morphogenesis, is heavily molecular, and most biologists think it all happens just by switching on and off genes. But in a single cell, switching on and off genes can't explain the morphogenesis of a single cell, because the genes are the same for the whole cell. And what's switched on and off is the same for the whole cell. So how does a cell, a single cell, create complex form? Well, I think the only answer is through a morphogenetic field. And instead of morphogenetic fields being conceived of as they currently are, primarily in terms of diffusing chemicals, I think they're actually vibratory patterns. And when you see those vibratory patterns, and you see these radially symmetrical structures, these are radiolarians, which are also single cells. They live in the sea, single celled organisms with silicosis skeletons. Again, I think that the underlying morphogenetic process must depend on waves, wave patterns of some kind, possibly acoustic waves, but more likely electrical wave patterns, within the cell membranes. These are famous pictures of Radiolarians by Ernst Haeckel. These forms, these are radially symmetrical forms, but vibratory patterns can also give rise to non-radially symmetrical patterns. This is just to remind you that radially symmetrical patterns, appear in art. This is the tomb, the dome of the Tomb of Hafez. And these are Rose windows at Chartres and at Notre Dame. And again, there's a limited number of radially symmetrical patterns. I'm not suggesting that they bought a cymascope, and developed these as a result of doing research with cymascopes, but if you're interested in radial symmetry, there's a limited number of patterns you can arrive at. Now, Pierre Could you help me with this one again? Because this is where we need a film. The film I about shows again from Alexander Lartabarcer. And it shows an isolated drop of water being vibrated. And what's interesting is that it undergoes a kind of morphogenesis. It's free to move. And this looks exactly like an insect embryo, with its segmented pattern. It's a remarkable way that this spontaneously takes up this form. Lartabarcer is also very interested in tortoises, and in the middle you see a tortoise shell, and around that you see tortoise shaped plates, on which there's a powder. These are like Chladni figures. And as you see, you can get something very like a tortoise shell pattern through vibrations. These these are like the nodes in the vibratory pattern. So I myself, think that biological morphogenesis is very largely vibration based, electrical or acoustic vibrations, and that morphogenetic fields are fields of vibration. And I think this is true also, we know it's true of atoms, we know that an atom is a vibratory pattern in quantum fields, vibrations in the quantum field. It's true of molecules. A benzene molecule, for example, has resonant ring of electrons around it, crystals of vibratory structures, and so are organisms, and so we, we have many vibrations in our bodies. We have slow rhythms like heartbeat, breathing, brainwaves. And in fact, brains have vibratory patterns of activity, which are probably much better modelled by vibrating models like these, than by digital computers trying to model what's happening in the brain. Now, when I was thinking about all this in preparation for this talk, I recalled that there's a whole series of hydrodynamical models, including my own, which work not on vibrations, but on fluid flows, which are also a kind of analog computer. And this one is a model of the British economy that was produced in 1949, by someone called Phillips. It's hydrodynamical. You have reservoirs with the money supply. You have flows, that represent income. You have diversions going to tax, you have foreign assets here, and exports. You have a pump at the bottom to get the money back up to the top. And it's all based on a series of tubes and flows. And you can change interest rates, taxation rates, by turning knobs and valves. And this model actually worked. It's called the Moniac computer, and they were manufactured in the 1950s. There are at least 40 of them in existence. They were bought by various governments, and for ten years the entire British economy was modelled by the UK Treasury, using this Moniac computer. Here's the actual device. It has readouts where you can actually see graphs, it plots graphs, so you can actually model the economy in a way that's much more intuitively recognizable, than opaque pages of code, which no one except computer experts can understand. Here ministers of finance, etc., could actually see what happens when you change interest rates, and so on. And with colored fluids running through. There are two or three working models in existence, one in New Zealand where it was used for modelling the New Zealand economy, and one in Britain. So when I spent quite a number of years doing research in India, as a plant physiologist, I was the principal plant physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute in Hyderabad, India, where I was working on the physiology of two legume crops, chickpeas and pigeon peas. Chickpeas are small plants, also known as Garbanzos, which are annuals. Pigeon peas are bushy plants, which are basically perennials. They're usually grown as annuals, but they're a perennial bush. And I was interested in how the pods develop. And what I found was if you look at the formation of pods in pigeon peas, this is the first formed pods, and then you go along, these are later, and later as flowering goes on and on, they keep forming pods And the number of seeds per pod, remains fairly consistent, and the weight per seed remains fairly consistent. But in chickpeas, which are an annual, you see a completely different pattern. The weight per pod, the number of the seeds per pod, and the weight per seed, all decrease as you get to the later formed pods. I then discovered this is a basic principle of all annual and perennial crops, or at least all the ones I looked at. That the perennials, the later formed fruits, are the same weight as the earlier form fruits, but in annuals they get smaller and smaller. And I think the reason is that, a perennial has to hold something back for next year. Whereas an annual plant, gives everything it's got forming seeds until it dies, it exhausts itself, doesn't mind exhausting itself, because it's going to die anyway. And I was then trying to think how to model them. One of my colleagues who worked on cereal physiology, was trained computer models, and the code was incredibly hard to understand. The computer kept breaking down in the Indian climate. He spent most of his time trying to import spare parts. So I decided, remembering this model of the British economy, that I'd produce a hydrodynamical model, of pod set in the pigeon pea, which I did. Not a theoretical model, an actual one. Here's me actually making it out of rubber tubing, and bicycle inner tubes, and buret clips equipment readily available in India. And here's a picture of the hydrodynamical model. There's a reservoir representing the amount of available sugar, or food. There's a tube here representing the branch. And these are the pods, and when you open the valve, because there's a siphon here, there has to be a certain amount of fluid here before a pod will fill. What happens is this pod fills, then this starts filling and it fills, then this one fills, then this one fills and it reaches a point where there's not enough fluid here to trigger the siphon. So you end up with a number of pods that are completely full and then the rest are empty. But if you reduce this threshold, lower this down until there's almost no siphon, no threshold, then they go on filling until the later ones are only partly full, until there's hardly anything in the last ones at all. Exactly like the chickpea. And when I demonstrated this model to my colleagues in India, I, and everybody else, got what was going on straightaway, and you could change the levels, you could move the height of the siphons, you could open and close the valves. It was a much more informative model, and it helped us understand the physiological basis of pod set. And in fact in plants, the sugars move around in tubes, called the phloem, and it really is a kind of hydrate dynamical process. So modelling these processes hydrodynamically, turns out to be much easier, much more comprehensible, much more illuminating, than spending in hiring lots of people to write pages and pages of code, all of which depends on theoretical assumptions. And when you don't know much about the system, you don't know if you got the right assumptions. This way you can do it by trial and error. Now, when I was thinking about this talk and this modelling process, I was amazed to find a paper that came out in philosophical transactions, of the Royal Society, just two weeks ago called, A Brief History of Liquid Computers by Andrew Adamatzky. It's called the Unconventional Computing Lab in the University of the West of England. And he discovered a whole series of other hydrodynamical and liquid models, mainly water based, including one here that involves jets of water going through valves. This is actually used in engineering applications. And and there's been an interest in various defence departments about these liquid computers, because if there's ever a war, or a serious international conflict, the very first thing that's going to happen is the entire internet, everything digital, is going to be wiped out cyber warfare will take it out, straight away. The only thing that will go on working, is liquid computers, and for message carrying, carrier pigeons. And the Swiss Army, until recently, had the only remaining carrier pigeon corps in Europe. I think the Chinese are the only people left with military pigeons, because they realized that they may actually need them one day. So this example, he gives about seven or eight different examples of liquid computation, which are very fascinating. Interestingly, there's a big fashion now for quantum computing. And quantum computing involves super proposed quantum states, and quantum phenomena are wave phenomena. Basically, what's happening in quantum computing is a reinvention of analog computing. The problem with analog computing is that you have to have specific analog models. It's not like a generalized machine that can do everything. You have to make specific models. But now, if you look in Nature, or other leading scientific journals, almost every two or three weeks, there's now a new analog computer model of chemical bonds, of molecular processes and so on. So I think, in fact, there is the beginning of a resurgence of analog computing. And even if we don't call it a computer, if we just call it an analog model, I think that these water based models are able to provide an enormous illumination, to many natural phenomena, which dense computer codes and digital computers can't. So that's really what I wanted to say this morning. A fresh look at the world of computing, and an appreciation of what we can learn from the dynamical properties of water, both through hydrodynamical flows and through wave patterns. Thank you.
NrN Search 'SHELDRAKE'
NrN Search 'RESONANCE'
NrN Search 'CYMATICS'
NrN Search 'WATER'
https://www.reddit.com/r/neuronaut/comments/he018s/what_is_schumann_resonance_and_how_it_is/
NrN Flair 'QEM'
https://www.reddit.com/r/neuronaut/comments/henz6v/life_out_of_sound_sonobiology_energy_filaments/
https://youtu.be/OhroLzvW-JI?t=234
https://youtu.be/Sb92_uEMtfU