"In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fraulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began." – Albert Einstein
When we layer Noether's Theorem, Richard Feynman's path integral theory and David Bohm's concept of intricate order, we can make sense of what drives the actions of living matter - and how our current conceptualization of the body completely falls apart.
Emmy Noether used the mathematics of group theory to show that every symmetry within a group that describes a physical phenomenon is connected to a conserved physical quantity.
Time invariance > Conservation of energy
Rotational invariance > Conservation of angular momentum
Translational invariance > Conservation of linear momentum
This means nature isn’t a set of mechanical events, it’s a system of deep, self-reflective balances, enforced not by force, but by pattern. The universe behaves lawfully because it’s structured symmetrically.
Conservation of charge, energy, the connection between electric and magnetic fields, are all the result of group symmetry.
This should prompt a question for today's medical scientists: Where is symmetry accounted for in human health?
In biological systems, symmetry is structure and function. Think of bilateral symmetry in bodies, charge symmetry across membranes, or homeostatic balance in hormones. When symmetry breaks, we call it disease—but we don’t measure health in terms of symmetry. Instead, we measure in scalar quantities (mg/dL, ng/mL, bpm).
What Noether showed was that all the conserved quantities that exist in the Universe exist because of a symmetry that exists within the abstract mathematical concept of a group.
"“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman showed, the behavior quantum objects are governed by a summation of possible histories and potentials known as a path integral. In order for a quantum particle to get from point A to point B, it has to take a certain path - but to understand this path we have to understand every possible path. We have to acknowledge that there is not just one definite path.
What happens isn’t chosen because it’s “efficient” or "chemically constant", but because of constructive interference of all probabilities.
And Noether tells us that the only limitation on these probabilities is their symmetry, and that the path taken is not pre-determined, but a result of which best conserves symmetry and maximized coherence.
When we apply this to biology, it becomes clear that a symptom is not the result of a single cause and a healing process is not linear or deterministic. Disease states emerge from complex, entangled histories: emotional, genetic, environmental, epigenetic, electrical.
"Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy." David Bohm
Now, Bohm said particles are not “independent billiard balls,” but unfolded manifestations of a deeper coherence.
He distinguished between the world we observe, or the explicate order, and the deeper field of energy that contains entanglement, meaning, and non-local resonance, one where everything is enfolded into everything else.
In medicine, the "explicate order" is the scan, the lab test, the visible tumor.
The "implicate order" is the trauma, ancestral memory, electric field, coherence state that precedes the visible. The he body cannot be reduced to parts and treated piecemeal. It can't be understood only by measuring the explicate order, and can't be healed without recognizing the implicate order.
Bohm demands we ask what is upstream of what we can measure?
Modern medicine is based on linear causality. It uses single-point values (blood sugar, cholesterol, TSH) and assumes deterministic pathways. It treats cells and their components as inert machines, burning chemicals into energy and running off a predetermined code. It attempts to collapse complexity into formulas, and use those formulas to achieve health and healing.
But if biology is emergent from symmetry (Noether), health is the result of coherence among infinite entangled paths (Feynman), and disease is the explicate manifestation of implicate disharmony (Bohm) - then treating bodies as machines is a fundamentally flawed framework.
"If one could grasp the whole Universe from one viewpoint, it would appear, if it is permitted to say this,
as a unique fact and a great truth" - Jean le Rond d'Alembert, French philosopher, 18th. century
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