GRAVITATIONAL CYCLES MATTER
Copernicus taught us over 500 years ago that our Earth is in motion - spinning, wobbling around our Earth-moon barycenter, and orbiting the solar system. This motion embeds all earthbound reference frames with accelerations and strains rich with periodicity and dynamic asymmetry - perfect for driving evolution and sustaining life. Many biological properties - from circadian and circalunar rhythms to basal metabolic rates and chirality - have the potential to be more naturally explained when Earth’s forgotten underlying dynamics are included. (See a summary here, Thorne, 2021). The major obstacle to weaving these dynamics into molecular biology has been the reliance on the Born-Oppenheimer Approximation adopted by both quantum mechanics and chemistry over a century ago. It effectively ‘Botoxed’ atomic structure and locked out external forces from participating in electromagnetic and nuclear interactions. One of the primary goals of THE COPERNICAN PROJECT is to build the theoretical modeling that will allow these omitted dynamics to be incorporated into atomic structure and devise experiments that will demonstrate their critical role in biology.
GRAVITATIONAL PERIODICITY CUEING METABOLIC TIMING
As we spin with the earth, we oscillate back and forth in the gravitational potential of both the sun and the moon. The gravitational potential oscillates in phase with the light intensity from the sun, strongest at noon, weakest at midnight. However, unlike sunlight, the gravitational potential can’t be masked and thus operates internally within all Earthbound systems irrespective of their location, or environmental conditions. This is consistent with the observation that all organisms on Earth express circadian periodicity - cueing their metabolic cycles to the solar cycle for survival and mating advantages. But it also offers a more natural explanation for the less well known circa lunar (~28 day) cycle which many organisms express even at the level of gene expression. We have compiled a database of over 200 species identified by other biologists that express metabolic cycles with circa lunar periodicity. Such cycles are not easily explained by transcription-translation cycles alone (the TTFL) since the rate of chemical processes varies significantly with temperature and environmental conditions. In comparison, orbital geometry is accurate to milliseconds per century.
(The circa lunar database will be linked here in January).
The dashed line in the image below (exaggerated for clarity) illustrates the wobbly pathway all earthbound objects and laboratories experience each day. All life evolved by finding order within this pathway. Mounting evidence suggests that living organisms utilize the periodicity and energy generated by both circadian and circalunar motion relative to the gravitational potential to help synchronize and drive metabolic functions. This suggests that metabolic order might now depend on these dynamic characteristics and when they are absent or altered for sustained periods - such as when in orbit, living on the moon, or when traveling to mars - metabolic pathways will become desynchronized leading to biological stress, abnormal biochemical development, and disease.
Our experiments are intended to either prove that the gravitational coupling is essential to metabolic order, or they will establish a new level of accuracy for their participation and justify their exclusion.
