The Shape of Plasma
How electro-magnetism and plasma create biological form
Plasma is quite magical stuff and yet at the same time it is so mundane that 99.9% of the Universe is comprised of it. It is nothing more than a cloud of atoms, a few of which become ionized causing them to have charge. It only needs to be a small ratio of ions to atoms, a few percent is enough.
Atoms may be free to drift happily through space but ions are immediately going to feel the forces of attraction and repulsion from their environment. The ions begin to move through the cloud of atoms according to their positive or negative charge. Motion of matter causes current to flow and immediately the cloud of atoms is a cloud of plasma with current running through it. This is a dark mode plasma, you can’t see it, but the electric field is present and current flows through it.
With more energy in the plasma there will be more ions in motion and a greater chance of ions colliding with other matter. These collisions result in waves of energy being radiated outward and when these are at visible wavelengths we perceive it as light. This is the glow mode of plasma and the atoms in the plasma determine the colour of the glow.
If the energy levels get very high indeed the matter can be ripped apart and reassembled as other elements or molecules releasing huge amounts of energetic waves. This is the arc mode of plasma best known from welding torches and lightning strikes.
As well as the motion, collisions and radiated energy, the presence of charge causes the ions to self-organize within the plasma to form layers. These layers become naturally stepped according to charge, they form like layers of an onion or the bands of Earth’s atmosphere. Because layers of stepped charge form naturally in plasma, with a difference of electrical potential either side of the layer, they naturally behave like a cell.
Now when I described plasma as a cloud of atoms with a few ions mixed in, I avoided using the more traditional explanation of a cloud of gas containing ions. This amounts to exactly the same thing, but I don't think we can really only think of plasma as a state of matter applicable to gases. These properties of plasma apply equally to liquids, and I believe this is what Dr. Gerald Pollack describes in his excellent lecture on the Fourth Phase of Water. It is this form of liquid plasma that is key to organic life, a more complex type of plasma with molecules as well as ions and far more densely packed than a disperse gaseous plasma.
If you are a proper mad scientist you will no doubt have a Plasma Ball to impress your friends, they are absolutely fascinating things. Here is a great youtube demonstration of some of their less well known secrets.
Now you’ll notice that the Electric Cell diagram is basically just a plasma ball with bits floating in it. There are 3 other points to bare in mind with the Electric Cell which come about because of the properties of plasma.
The first is that it is really a 3D object, so the filaments of current in the plasma ball flowing from anode to cathode are not simple wavy lines, in 3 dimensions these are vortices, tiny tightly twisted Birkeland currents that behave like tornados.
The second is that because current flows from the anode to the cathode, the cell has electro-magnetic polarity exactly like a torch battery does. It has a north pole and a south pole like a magnet.
Finally, what an observer of the cell perceives are the waves that are emitted from it. Light energy captured by the DNA antenna flows from the nucleus (anode) through the cell plasma and it may be absorbed and emitted many times in the collisions and chemical interactions (or stored and expended by organelles) before it reaches the cathode and is emitted. With each interaction, the properties of the waves are changed and the final output is only what escapes, so we cannot see inside a cell to get the full story, we can see only what escapes as light.
The structure of the DNA molecule (antenna) determines the wave frequencies at which it can resonate to capture energy, but the DNA is the same in every cell of an organism. It is a combination of the properties of the absorbed wave, as well as it’s interactions with matter in the plasma that becomes projected to the observer as the cell’s form.
The cells form works like a biological hologram but things start to get really interesting when you have more than one Electric Cell networked together which I will be looking at next.