Epigenetic effects of stress by Bruce McEwen (1)

A rendering of how changes in an electron’s motion (bottom view) alter the scattering of light (top view), as measured in a new experiment that scattered more than 500 photons of light from a single electron. Previous experiments had managed to scatter no more than a few photons at a time. Credit: Extreme Light Laboratory|University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Summary:

Pseudoscientists refuse to accept that fact.

When is stress good for you? by Bruce McEwen

The subtle flows and toxic hits of stress get under the skin, making and breaking the body and brain over a lifetime

My life’s work has helped me to tell the story of stress, starting with the mentors for my dissertation, completed in 1964.

See McEwen et al., (1964): Dependence of RNA synthesis in isolated thymus nuclei on glycolysis, oxidative carbohydrate catabolism and a type of “oxidative phosphorylation”

The synthesis of RNA in isolated thymus nuclei is ATP dependent.

Pseudoscientists refuse to accept that fact.

See for example: Quantum Physics News

Robert Karl Stonjek claims and asks (with my emphasis):Where did all that energy come from?

Big Bang and Quantum Physics

As we well know, there are some huge difficulties for the Big Bang model. There is the problem of the missing antimatter, the failure to come up with the required unification theory of matter, the requirement for Dark Matter which has never been directly observed and Dark Energy for which there is no description of what it actually is, at least when we ask QM questions about it.

Other problems include the general picture that says that the universe began with spacetime expansion and not a ballistic explosion and that spacetime expansion has slowed ever since. But spacetime expansion was later shown to be increasing, not decreasing, and there is no indication that spacetime expansion was ever explosively fast. Then there is inflation on top of that, an explanation, given without any evidence whatsoever, simply because it makes a preconceived model work.

In other words the model comes first and then we search for evidence, which is what religionists have been doing for millennia. Science differentiated itself from religion by starting with observation and experiment before structuring mathematical models based on what was already established empirically.

There are other problems with the Big Bang that Quantum Physicists should be concerned with. There is not only the thermal entropy, which Roger Penrose rightly points out is at maximum (not minimum) at the Big Bang and for some time after (gravitational entropy is at a minimum) but the idea that the initial condition was extremely hot.

I question how this can be. Sure, if you compress matter it will heat up, but the initial configuration of matter was not a result of compression. Further, and most importantly, the particles of matter were maximally compressed so that they could not possibly move before expansion began. If a particle can not move then it can neither emit or absorb energy, a photon, and so is at absolute zero Kelvin.

In fact this is how we define zero Kelvin, and in Black Holes the temperature is at zero Kelvin. One might argue that the energy is in the form of a halo of photons and other bosons, which is more or less the Lamartre model which was overtaken by Gamow’s hot big bang (as it came to be known).

So, how can a compressed matter taking up a zero or near zero volume that is in that configuration not as a result of compression suddenly acquire a high temperature? Where did all that energy come from?

Researchers simply plug the temperature in, easy to do with the math, but I question where this energy came from and in what form it was in before expansion began to occur. Sure, Bosons can all occupy the same space, but a photon can not be at rest and so can not exist for any interval before expansion.

It seems to me that the first era of the Big Bang, up to the emission of the CMB, is a ‘just so’ story based entirely on the wishes and imagining of a few theorists and entirely devoid of evidence of any kind. There is, however, abundant evidence that the Big Bang did not occur: almost no anti-matter, high thermal entropy, no evidence of the near infinite number of additional universes postulated by inflation theory, no observational or experimental evidence for inflation, no unification of gravity, strong and electroweak forces and so on.

See for comparison: Quantum common sense

We don’t need a conscious mind to measure or look. With or without us, the Universe is always looking

See also: Aeon Archive. During my vacation from June 26 until July 7, I commented on posts to Aeon because I did not have access to my bibliography of ~8000 published works. I’ve included all past comments to Aeon because Bruce McEwen has again helped to clarify the role of epigenetic effects on energy-dependent RNA-mediated cell type differentiation.