What if everything you were told about how the cells of your body get their energy was wrong? What if the body could tap the relatively limitless resources of the Sun directly? Even more astounding, what if the body could tap the infinite energy density of the quantum vacuum and even turn that energy into matter, as well as transform elements into one another? Welcome to the electrifying implications of the New Biophysics. 

[This is an exclusive, pre-launch release of Chapter 3 from REGENERATE: Unlocking Your Body’s Radical Resilience Through The New Biology — the most provocative of them all!]

The energy needs of the human body have long been envisioned as dependent upon physical “fuel” being fed to the glucose-burning furnaces within the mitochondria of our cells. Indeed, our fixation on the caloric content of food reflects this outdated and fundamentally inaccurate concept. Calories are simply a measurement of the amount of heat given off when we internally incinerate food, which is a crude metric when we consider the complexity, elegance, and mystery of human metabolism.

Our bodies, in addition to utilizing ATP-based mechanisms of energy transfer, are capable of harnessing “free” energy directly from the sun through a variety of means, including water-, melanin-, and chlorophyll-mediated processes. No doubt, there are many other energy-generating processes at play yet to be discovered. But while examples of alternative energy sources based on EZ water or melanin may seem like a radical departure from conventional theories of cellular bioenergetics, they actually still aren’t radical enough to account for what is really going on.

The truth is that our bodies can access, accumulate, and put to work immense quantities of free energy, or energy that does not need to be extracted from physical substances such as food. The body has an even more direct, limitless source of energy that it can, and does, continually access—one that may finally explain accounts of humans living without food or water for prolonged periods of time. Recent experiments reveal that, despite long-standing assumptions that cytosol, the aqueous part of a cell’s cytoplasm, has zero electric fields, it actually contains an electric field strength as high as 15 million volts per meter.⁴⁸ (For comparison, high-voltage power lines typically operate at 155,000 to 765,000 volts per meter.) Even more astounding is the fact that the inner membrane of a single mitochondrion has an electric field strength of 30 million volts,⁴⁹ which is comparable to the electrical field generated by the flares coming off the surface of the sun or a thunderbolt.

But where does this immense energy come from? In order to answer this question, we’ll have to explore some of the most foundational discoveries of quantum physics. After all, all our bodies’ molecules are composed of atoms, whose fundamental structure lies at the sub-sub-sub-atomic level of the quantum of action, which means understanding human physiology and cellular bioenergetics will require at least a basic understanding of quantum physics.

In the New Biophysics, space is described as the quantum vacuum, unlike its more passive precursor of classical physics, where it is visualized as an empty and invisible container for physical things. The quantum vacuum is not a void but is instead teeming with zero-point energy, that is, the vibrational energy at baseline or ground state that remains present even when the system being observed from a classical perspective is at absolute zero and appears completely empty and motionless. In quantum field theory, estimates of the vacuum energy density within “empty space” range from infinity to the mass density of about 1096 kilograms per cubic meter (that’s a 10 with 96 zeros behind it!), which in practical terms is infinite. This is the reason American physicist Richard Feynman remarked that “one teacup of empty space contains enough energy to boil all the world’s oceans.” Similarly, Swiss physicist Nassim Haramein predicts that the zero-point vacuum energy contained within the volume of a single proton is equal to the mass of all protons in the observable universe.

Within this understanding of empty space, matter (in the form of virtual particles) is constantly popping in and out of existence within the quantum vacuum, similar to a foam coalescing and disappearing at the bottom of an immense waterfall of energy.

The New Biophysics of Energy Synthesis

The version of reality described by quantum field theory physics seemingly violates basic laws of thermodynamics, with its conservation of energy and matter, and completely contradicts the classic Newtonian, macroscopic experience of space and objects within which we live. Yet it is the best explanation for how forces and particles behave, with a wide range of modern technologies like laser systems, MRIs, and semiconductor devices owing their existence to it.

So, how does this relate to the New Biology? If quantum field theory is accurate, and a practically infinite source of energy is available to biological systems at any point in space, everything we have learned about how the cell works and what our bodies need to survive would need to be revised. Indeed, an entirely new field called quantum biology has sprung up in order to understand how these discoveries at the level of the quantum of action affect biological systems, from the most basic molecular building blocks of the cell all the way up to human physiology and the origin and nature of consciousness itself.

A concrete example of a biological system that harnesses energy from the quantum vacuum can be found in the wall-crawling gecko lizard, which can hang from ceilings and scale smooth surfaces like glass, seemingly boldly defying basic physical laws of gravity.

In quantum physics, there is a phenomenon known as the Casimir effect.⁵⁰ By placing two uncharged metallic plates extremely close together (a few micrometers apart), without any external electromagnetic field present, the quantum vacuum energy draws the plates together from the wide range of electromagnetic frequencies in the energy density of the vacuum of space. The longer wavelengths are excluded from within the small opening between the plates, hence pushing the plates together from the outside in, proving the vacuum is full of “real” energy and can affect the objects in “real space.”

The gecko, it turns out, has extremely small Casimir-like plate structures at the end of its bulbous feet in the form of millions of microscopic hairs. When applied to a flat surface, these hairs harness the Casimir effect to help keep the gecko stuck to the wall. While there are other proposed contributing factors, such as electrostatic effects, the Casimir effect is believed to be a primary cause.

Using engineering principles of biomimicry, researchers at Stanford have harnessed the Casimir effect to create a “Spider-Man” suit that allows humans to crawl up buildings.⁵¹ The suit’s “gecko gloves,” capable of forming a strong bond with smooth surfaces and distributing large loads like the weight of the human body evenly, comprise a pad of independent tiles with progressive and degressive load-sharing elements, covered in synthetic adhesives that contain sawtooth-shaped polymer structures approximately the width of a human hair.⁵² So promising is this technology that applications of these pads are being explored on the robotic arms of spacecrafts in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The unusual, quantum-mechanical origin of the gecko’s superpower even makes sense from a conventionally minded evolutionary perspective. Should we really be surprised that after billions of years of trial and error, where even the slightest advantage has life-and-death consequences, living things would eschew a quantum free lunch? Indeed, the Casimir effect and other zero-point energy–harnessing processes are operative at the most fundamental building blocks of our biological architecture.