10/9 老いを知る　Understanding Aging | 加納技術経営研究所

I celebrated my 81st birthday on October 2, 2019. I would like to thank those many of you who sent me birthday greetings. I have written this reflective piece to share with everyone what I am thinking and where I’m at these days. My special thanks go to Dr. Carlos Paz de Araujo who has continuously provided me with enormous energy in my life.

Understanding Aging

Perhaps because I’m reaching an advanced age, I have much more contact with physicians these days. Being able to discuss issues in the field of medicine with a professional has become one of my recent enjoyments. One topic in particular has especially caught my attention. It’s a topic that shares a common thread with semiconductor engineering—an area with which, as you know, I have been closely involved through my works for over six decades now. The topic is how the concept of quantum mechanics, which I still don’t truly understand even today, is connected to modern medicine—how closely it is related to medicine and the life sciences—and to human life itself. This topic has really grabbed my attention. If this is what it means to understand aging, it has caught me off guard.

The issue was brought to my attention by a recent acquaintance, Dr. Hiromi Wada, emeritus professor at Kyoto University (who has long been a surgeon at Kyoto University Hospital). It is explained in detail in his latest book, “Cancer and Entropy”. After reading this book, I felt as though my eyes had suddenly opened.

I had first heard the term and learned the concept of “entropy” back when I was a student of electrical engineering at Osaka University. That means I’ve been stalked for more than 60 years in mind and body by a perplexing question that to this day still seems to make little sense. Many people will know that quantum mechanics is the fundamental theory behind the science that supports the semiconductor industry, which in turn drives modern economic development.

When you see the application of the concepts of entropy and quantum mechanics to medicine that pertains to human life and medical conditions such as cancer and stroke, the ideas take on an undeniable significance. Entropy is a concept that describes the irreversible disorder that affects the nearly 60 trillion cells making up the human body. One can understand entropy as molecular mechanisms being disturbed, resulting in a loss of equilibrium, coupled with a biological inability to return to the original ordered state. It would be like trying to turn waste products back into the original components they came from. This explanation helped me to understand the concept and its similar application to electron movement in atoms. The natural progression of cells toward disorder that increases with aging is the universal principle of entropy applied to the human organism. Explained as such, I found the concept easy to understand; the same angle could perhaps also be used to better understand quantum mechanics. By the way, two books that seem worth a read to understand more in this area are: ” What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell by Erwin Schrodinger” and ” Life on the Edge by Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili “.

What is the force that keeps “disordering entropy” in check and balances it with “entropic ordering?” It is the life force. This explanation has been quite persuasive for me. When I learned that it could explain the most basic functioning of the natural world—biochemical oxidation and deoxidization—I became even more impressed with the universality and greatness of this truth.

I am also quite interested in the mythology that God gave birth to humanity in contrast to the Darwinian theory of evolution, so already sitting on my bedside table is the international bestseller that address the issue, among many others—”Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari”. I have already started to read this book.

In addition to the mystery of the birth of the universe and the birth of humanity, we must also look at the disruptions and disturbances occurring in global society today—the Trumpists in the United States, Brexit in the United Kingdom, the youth protests in Hong Kong, the nuclear threats of North Korea, the environmental activism of a Swedish girl, and other defining issues and conflicts that will take their place in history. I feel that we need to apply the lens of “order and disorder” to these phenomena in order to more comprehensively examine each issue. In an overextended capitalist economy, there are many people around the world who have become seriously concerned about the growing problem of the disordering effects of entropy that could lead to chaos.

I’m also starting to think it might be interesting to reexamine the Schrödinger equation, which is pertinent to this problem, and for which its creator, Erwin Schrodinger, the father of quantum mechanics, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933.

As aging progresses, disordering entropy will continue to increase, so how can an aging society maintain the “healthy longevity” it proclaims to strive toward? This question may turn out to be one of the most enduring and important questions that humanity faces