These two quotes intrigue me.
The God question and the Theory of Relativity are two of my enduring interests.
If reality is a field of forces that generate mass and energy, then there are rules that govern that. Because there are finite limits on both the size and the "energy" of the field.
Reality would be an amorphous mass if the fields/forces were infinite or the basic structure were merely probable. There are forces which shape reality into a coherent, cohesive whole. There are laws governing the structure of reality. A game of marbles is a "probability" of where the marbles have been or will be but the marbles are all within a field of forces that interact and can likely be measured very accurately.
Laws are descriptions of the limitations both for expansion and contraction within the field.
If a marble (electron) can move freely within the field then the motion is governed by gravity, mass; physical conditions defined as set laws
However, if the marble (electron) has a cumulative mass of many marbles confined in a bag, then the motion of that bag of marbles in the same field will be entirely different.
Nothing can be determined about quantum by behavior unless the underlying forces (fields) are understood.
And we don't understand where that electron will be or has been because we don't know enough about the effects or nature of the fields to predict it's motion, any more than we can predict the roll of a single marble.
We barely understand the motion of planets (large mass, big bags of marbles) in a field (gravity).
Meanwhile, if I give you a marble you can't tell me where it has been or where it will be.
We are always in the now. The world does not age, it moves. All the mass and energy that is right this minute is the sum total of all the mass and energy that ever existed. And there isn't any way of knowing where it was or where it will be so quantum theory is actual macro fact. We know for an absolute fact we cannot predict the future. It is also an absolute fact that we cannot predict the past.
I read a lot. I'm actually a high school dropout. The theories that are being investigated now are beyond the 'Big Bang.'
Finite to me is so huge finding the boundaries would be difficult. An interesting new one is, all the material spewed forth from a black hole and perhaps another before that.
On a different subject, here is something closer to home to consider.
Bacteria and viruses penetrate the blood - brain barrier. Hopefully this will give some hope to those in the future that will suffer from dementia.
Until recently, however, the existence of a brain microbiome seemed far-fetched. Our central nervous system is protected by a membrane called the blood-brain barrier, which is supposed to filter out any potential pathogens before they can damage our neurons. What’s more, the brain has its own private immune system with foot soldiers called microglia to deal with any intruders. While some viruses and bacteria were known to penetrate this fortress and cause symptoms of severe illnesses such as
encephalitis, infiltration was thought to be a rare occurrence. It seemed inconceivable that the brain could host a whole population of diverse microbes.
Read more
Microglia: How the brain’s immune cells may be causing dementia
A few years ago, when one of
Christopher Link’s graduate students at the University of Colorado Boulder mentioned this possibility, Link was shocked. “I stopped him and I berated him,” he says. Afterwards, however, he decided to take a look at the literature, discovering that the
evidence base was already much larger than he had imagined – although most of the studies focused on dementia rather than the brain microbiome more generally.
As far back as the early 1990s,
Ruth Itzhaki, then at the University of Manchester, UK, had sequenced the genes in post-mortem brain samples from people who had had Alzheimer’s disease. She and her colleagues found that the tissue was often
riddled with the HSV1 herpes simplex virus – the microbe that causes cold sores. This appeared to be no isolated incident, with further research showing that
Porphyromonas gingivalis, the bacteria behind gum disease, was similarly
prevalent in the brains of people who had died with dementia.
Until recently, the existence of brain microbiome seemed far-fetched
Such findings were initially greeted with scepticism. Some suspected that the microbes were a result of contamination of the samples in the lab. Others suggested that they may have only entered the brain in the late stages of dementia, as a result of the individuals’ failing health. “Maybe it’s all after the fact,” says Link.
Such doubts began to disappear in 2010, when the late
Robert Moir at Harvard Medical School and his colleagues took a closer look at the beta-amyloid plaques that characterise Alzheimer’s. These sticky bundles of protein are toxic to neurons and have long been considered the primary cause of the condition, yet the team’s research
revealed they had an unexpected function. “Their role is to entrap and kill pathogens,” says Lathe. “They are defending the brain.” And the discovery that
beta-amyloid is found across amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals suggests that invading pathogens have been a considerable threat to the brain’s health for much of evolution. What’s more, it indicates a clear mechanism through which microbes might influence the development of dementia. “It was a turning point,” says Lathe.
The mounting evidence leads him to suggest that
dementia can result from an increased burden of microbes in the brain as we age. In our younger years, our immune system is strong enough to prevent too many of these organisms reaching our neural tissue. As we get older, however, our defences weaken – a process known as
immunosenescence – allowing certain microbes to breach those defences. The beta-amyloid deposits may be a sign of the brain’s continued struggle to keep these organisms in check. Once the toxic plaques have formed, however, they may cause collateral damage to the surrounding tissue, resulting in continued cognitive decline – although this is a matter of debate. “I’m certainly interested in entertaining the idea that maybe, even before you’re sick, there’s this sort of continual challenge from microbes that enter the brain,” says Link.
We still don’t know how all these microbes end up in the brain, but Lathe notes there are several possible ways they might gain access. Organisms could use our own immune cells as a Trojan horse, for instance. “They could infect macrophages which permeate straight into the brain,” says Lathe. Others may have enzymes that allow them to squeeze through small gaps in the blood-brain barrier. Or they might travel along the nerves from the nose and mouth, some of the few direct entrances into our neural tissue. We also don’t know whether some of our brain’s inhabitants are beneficial. After all, certain microbes in the gut help with digestion, so it is possible that others in the brain aid thinking and reasoning. Link and Lathe are both open-minded about this. “It’s not obvious, but it’s not impossible,” says Link.
Do bacteria play a role in dementia?
To get the bigger picture, Lathe recently attempted to
take stock of the brain microbiome in people with and without dementia. Working with colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, he examined genetic material from 79 neural samples held in brain banks in the UK and US. The analysis revealed a remarkable diversity of organisms, with as many as 100,000 species per sample. The community included viruses, bacteria and fungi. The researchers even found the remnants of a plant or alga-like organism, though they admit it could have come from pollen that somehow got into the brain. Intriguingly, this microbiome was a subset of the microbes found in the gut – representing about 20 per cent of the species found there.
But even if a dysregulated brain microbiome only underlies some cases of dementia, it may still play a role in other neurological conditions. One finding hinting at this is that the alpha-synuclein proteins associated with Parkinson’s disease also
have antimicrobial properties. “When you knock them out in the mice, the mice are more sensitive to brain infections,” says Link. Like beta-amyloid, alpha-synuclein may enhance survival in the short term, but – for reasons that are currently unknown – the process could spiral out of control in some people.
Although many questions remain, the discovery that microbes are implicated in neurodegenerative diseases already suggests
potential new treatments. One obvious approach is to protect the body from pathogens that have been linked to Alzheimer’s. Researchers at the National Defense Medical Center in Taipei, Taiwan, for instance, followed people who had received a course of antiviral medication to treat a herpes simplex virus infection. The result appeared to be a
dramatically reduced risk of developing dementia over the following 10 years.
This raises the question of whether some of the microbes in our brains come from the gut. A recent study in mice found that some pathogens, such as the fungus
Candida albicans, can slip through the gut lining, hitch a ride with the blood and
breach the brain’s protective membrane. However, these relocating fungi were mostly found in mice with impoverished gut microbiomes. “The bacteria in the gut [normally] compete with the fungus and prevent it crossing into the rest of the body,” says
Aimée Parker at the Quadram Institute in Norwich, UK, who led the study. “So, in healthy people, we don’t really get fungal translocation.” Nevertheless, Lathe’s team did find that
Candida was among a variety of organisms – of unknown origin – that were more prevalent in people with dementia than in those without. “We see well-known human pathogens such as the bacteria
Staphylococcus,
Streptococcus, as well as the fungi
Cryptococcus and
Candida are all over-represented in Alzheimer’s brain,” says Lathe.
The discovery that microbes are implicated in neurodegenerative diseases already suggests potential new treatments
Other research suggests that the presence of any single pathogen may be less important in causing dementia than the
overall composition of the brain microbiome.
Jeffrey Lapides and his colleagues at Drexel University College of Medicine in Pennsylvania recently examined post-mortem brain tissue from 32 individuals, half of whom had had Alzheimer’s. Like Lathe’s team, they found a large variety of organisms. But they also learned that particular combinations of microbes were associated with different stages of the disease. A group of bacteria known as
Comamonas, for instance, were considerably more prevalent in people without dementia, while
Methylobacterium and
Cutibacterium acnes (which causes teenage spots) dominated the distribution during the later stages of Alzheimer’s. We can only speculate about the reasons for these changes, but Lapides suggests that interactions between the different species might put additional strain on the brain. “The chemical results of their competition may be toxic,” he says.
Of course, there are
other hypotheses that attempt to explain Alzheimer’s. However, the idea that the brain’s microbiome plays a role need not be at odds with these. “I suspect that there are different things that induce Alzheimer’s in different people,” says Link. He points out that even having a gene associated with the disease, such as
APOE4, doesn’t dictate how it might develop: “If you’re
APOE4, then you are at a higher risk of cardiovascular problems, you also have lipid transport problems and you also have alterations of your immune response.” Each one of these mechanisms may offer a different pathway for Alzheimer’s to emerge, he suggests.
Other measures could
bolster the brain’s defences against a whole range of invaders. For instance,
the BCG jab – most commonly used as a vaccine against tuberculosis – seems to ramp up the immune system, reducing the risk of many infections besides TB for up to a year. Quite remarkably, and presumably as a result of this, some studies indicate that the injection can
cut the prevalence of dementia by as much as 45 per cent. Excitingly, several other vaccines,
including flu jabs and the
shingles injection Zostavax, appear to offer similar protection.
If dementia results from a problematic brain microbiome, it may even be possible to completely reverse it – a prospect that is unthinkable with our current treatments. Schultek’s recovery from her rapid decline inspired her to
search for similar case studies. Working with other members of the
Alzheimer’s Pathobiome Initiative (AlzPI), the research group she set up, she identified reports of 86 people who had been diagnosed with dementia and then subsequently benefitted from antimicrobial treatments. The pathogens responsible included many that are over-represented in the brain microbiomes of people with Alzheimer’s, including
Cryptococcus fungi. Tellingly, she also found a handful of cases involving
B. burgdorferi – one of the bacteria implicated in her illness. “It was kind of eerie,” says Schultek. “These case reports came from clinicians around the world, but the conclusions were the same nearly every time: that infection testing should be a part of the differential diagnosis.”
Reversing cognitive decline
Schultek suspects these case studies only capture a thin slice of the people who have recovered from cognitive decline in this way. “The majority of clinicians who treat patients don’t publish the results,” she says. She also believes that rogue microbes in the brain may be the cause of neurocognitive issues in many people. Unfortunately, screening the brain’s microbiome without invasive surgery remains a challenge. But cerebrospinal fluid, taken through a lumbar puncture, provides traces of its occupants that could be used for diagnosis. “My personal hypothesis is that if we were to screen everyone, we would find evidence of ongoing, active infection in a significant portion of dementia cases,” says Schultek.
Interest in the brain’s microbiome is certainly growing. In July this year, the AlzPI held
a day-long symposium on the topic, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America now
offers funding for Alzheimer’s studies. Understandably, the link with dementia still leads research efforts, but, more broadly, there is still so much about the brain microbiome that remains to be discovered. This even includes the identity of some of our brain’s inhabitants. “We sometimes see RNA sequences that are not present in any of the genome databases,” says Link. He calls this clandestine community the “dark microbiome”. “There are probably lots of viruses and other things out there that we don’t know anything about.”
Neuroscientists have been surprised to discover that the human brain is teeming with microbes, and we are beginning to suspect they could play a role in neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's
www.newscientist.com
I've subscribed to several scientific magazines. This now seems to be my favorite. A weekly for around 100.00 annually.
