Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: thebrain13 on 03/12/2019 06:19:12
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I have a theory based on this concept and was wondering if you guys thought this was possible. From what I understand (could be wrong) a wave-function (a mathematical description describing the time and place of a particle like a photon) can be anything, any shape, any level of complexity. It is also my understanding that they can be physically manipulated into any shape as well. So could it be possible that you could send an infinite amount of information over space by replicating that photon many times over like lasers replicate photons?
So for instance, One scientists encodes into a photons life-wave the shape of a heart. Could another scientist capture one of the photons with a heart shaped wave-function at a distance, then essentially clone that photon and construct a heart with its wave-function? Is this possible?
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For a start photons do not have a life wave. They have a wave function. The function has to be continuos so, no, it can't be heart shaped. That does not describe a wave. You need to learn about the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics before making anymore rash statements.
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First off life-wave was a Freudian slip typo. It's in regards to a theory about life sending information with waves of this nature. I think DNA's shape looks a little "coincidentally" like a circularly polarized photons wave-function. Lastly bud, don't know why you are answering the question with such a tone as you have no idea who I am, and it was a question, but I have taken QM classes at my University before I am a physics major. I'm pretty sure you wrong that wave functions can't be specific shapes btw
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Please identify the guilty university.
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a wave-function ...of a photon can be anything, any shape, any level of complexity.
For a single, isolated photon in a vacuum (eg from a linear-polarised laser), the wavefunction is pretty simple: an electric field and a magnetic field.
However, if you pass it through multiple slits, lenses, a quarter-wave plate and other obstructions, the wavefunction will be more complex, and the probability of detecting the photon in a particular place is harder to predict without careful analysis.
could it be possible that you could send an infinite amount of information over space by replicating that photon many times over like lasers replicate photons?
Ironically, if you replicate photons exactly, you can't send any more information than was contained in the single photon that you started from.
- To transmit more information, you need to modulate the laser beam in some manner
- A common method is by varying the brightness (amplitude) of the laser beam. This works fine up to around 10Gbps
- To get to higher speeds (eg 100Gbps), you need to vary the amplitude and phase of the photons
- Other modulation methods are possible, like varying the frequency of the photons (hard to do quickly in a laser)
- Having multiple photons gives you resiliency, so if a few photons (or even 99% of photons) are lost, you can still extract the original information.
The ideal laser will have a single frequency; however, a modulated laser will have a range of frequencies.
- A single frequency can't transmit any information (except that the laser is visible)
- However, a modulated laser can transmit information. The more information, the broader the frequency spectrum (generally speaking)
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulation
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Given how simple photons are (they are seemingly fundamental particles), wouldn't there be a hard limit on how much information a single photon could transmit? Something as complex as a heart contains trillions upon trillions of atoms, each one containing multiple particles itself. I don't think a single photon has enough properties to represent all of that information by itself.
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First off life-wave was a Freudian slip typo. It's in regards to a theory about life sending information with waves of this nature. I think DNA's shape looks a little "coincidentally" like a circularly polarized photons wave-function. Lastly bud, don't know why you are answering the question with such a tone as you have no idea who I am, and it was a question, but I have taken QM classes at my University before I am a physics major. I'm pretty sure you wrong that wave functions can't be specific shapes btw
I can infer from what you say that you don't know what you are talking about.
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(could be wrong)
You are.
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Please identify the guilty university.
Michigan State University
Given how simple photons are (they are seemingly fundamental particles), wouldn't there be a hard limit on how much information a single photon could transmit? Something as complex as a heart contains trillions upon trillions of atoms, each one containing multiple particles itself. I don't think a single photon has enough properties to represent all of that information by itself.
Really I need another word than wave-function to ask the question properly. In a vacuum the wave function of a linearly polarized wave is the familiar shape of the sinusoidal electric wave followed by the perpendicular magnetic wave. In circularly polarized light this is a double helix, just like DNA. It's the same shape as the familiar e.m. wave only twisted with the magnetic field following the electric field 90 degrees out of phase. This is the unaltered intrinsic wave-function of a photon.
Then you have this secondary class of wave-functions dependent on Feynmans "infinite path integrals" in accordance with QED. By adding all of the vectors of every conceivable path a particle can take and then squaring the resultant vectors, a whole new wave-function can be calculated in time and space. We can change the resultant wave-function to anything we want to by altering the individual paths a photon can take, like with the twin slits experiment or we could alter the path by altering the time a photon travels, like how a lens or water can change the probability of light by altering the time it takes individual paths a particle can take.
I'm not talking about this type of time/geometry altered wave-functions. Instead I'm asking (And I know this is not a stock standard curriculum idea) can the wave-function for a particle (all particles have wave-functions) be altered in a way that it would be different in a vacuum regardless of the geometry/time related altercations of QED? And secondly, if it could, can this altercation be transferred when it goes through the processes of stimulated emission?
If this were true, a large number of particles with specific wave-functions could be replicated and eventually all of the characteristics of its "intrinsic" wave-function be determined. Ultimately meaning, one particle could conceivable contain any information if it was carefully replicated enough times as the information is contained in the group that becomes the overall wave-function.
Again it's just a theory, just wondering if you guys think any of it is possible.
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wouldn't there be a hard limit on how much information a single photon could transmit?
How much information you can transfer depends on the Bandwidth and the Signal-to-Noise ratio
- Photons have a phenomenal bandwidth
- So, in theory, a single photon could transfer immense amounts of information
- provided you have a low-noise way of generating, transmitting and detecting them
Hypothetically, if you could generate a photon with a frequency accurate to 1Hz
- over the visible range of 400-800 THz
- and detect that frequency accurate to 1Hz,
- Then this allows you to select one out 400x1012 possibilities
- which is about 48 bits on one photon
- You get even more combinations if you can send 2 (or multiple) photons containing different information.
- This is without looking at different modes of polarization, or the time that the photon is generated
Of course, there are practical limits which prevent this:
- Even small movements of atoms in the transmitter or detector will cause a Doppler shift error of 1Hz
- The photon could be elastically scattered from an air molecule, and lose energy (or totally miss the detector)
- We have no mechanism that can generate or detect photons with precise frequencies at a rate of trillions of photons per second
- Heisenberg uncertainty will limit the precision with which you can generate or detect the frequency/energy and time of a photon
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem
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How much information you can transfer depends on the Bandwidth and the Signal-to-Noise ratio
I find that interesting. I don't think I've ever really thought about this particular issue very deeply before. I used to assume that a single, fundamental particle could only hold one bit of information (in, for example, its spin state). Now I see there's a lot more versatility there.
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- So, in theory, a single photon could transfer immense amounts of information- evan au
Thanks Evan.
Also Alan, my university sends it's kind regards for recognizing my talents.
To give you guys a little more context about why I ask these questions. About 7 years ago, I came up with this idea that life was too complex to explain away with mere random mutations of earth. The solution was simple, if life can transmit the genome over space, much higher levels of complexity can be achieved as random mutations on earth are not needed to break every barrier.
I'm honestly convinced this is actually how life really works, so much so, I left my fiance in Michigan and moved to silicon valley to pursue what I call Universal Evolution. I've cold approached professors from Berkeley who lecture on CRISPR to talk about the physical nature of the Helixical nature of not just DNA but the way DNA is meticulously coiled into other helixes at right angles to the initial helix. This I theorize, is life manipulating the infinite pathways of QED giving life the ability to control the probability of where photons go for the purposes of construction in the body. Let's remember that the 2018 Nobel prize in physics was won for optical tweezers, where scientists used nothing but light to control specific atoms at a time, they used this in particular to unravel single DNA strands. I think life can engineer this way relieving the need to accomplish everything with direct molecular processes.
Lastly, I think the chromosome is is manipulating a certain type of circularly polarized light I call a "life-wave" whose wave-function is aiding in construction but is also capable of transmitting the whole genome over space. If even 1 percent of the 25% of the total BMR the body uses to run the sodium potassium ion pump, (which causes electrical potential energy) was used to create "life-waves" that escape the body, I calculated that specific species would receive scores of these photons, making the existence of life a universe wide phenomenon provided life knew how to receive these waves.
Anyways, I'm going to approach more physics guys from Berkeley and Stanford soon, I was hoping you guys could help me out a bit in figuring out how life accomplishes this task. I already have concepts, I'm just trying to sharpen it. Also thanks again for the well thought out response evan au. I'm not super familiar with the concept of bandwith though, so I'll have to look into it more.
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Again it's just a theory
Nope
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory
just wondering if you guys think any of it is possible.
No.
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I think the chromosome is is manipulating a certain type of circularly polarized light I call a "life-wave"
Have you detected any of these "life-wave" photons?
- Have you worked out the Signal-to-Noise ratio of these photons?
- We have something like a 30 trillion cells in our bodies, each with about 6 billion DNA bases.
- These DNA bases are vibrating in complex modes at body temperature of 37C
- The vibrations are conducted along the DNA strands, and bump into adjacent water molecules, proteins and enzymes
- All these vibrations absorb and emit Infra-Red radiation
- All these photons are emitted randomly by each segment of DNA in every cell (and the water molecules in each cell)
- So the noise level is immense, from every cell around a hypothetical DNA receiver
- High noise level means little or no data transmission
To avoid cancer, the DNA is actually quite resistant to photons
- infra-red does not have enough energy to change it
- even visible light does not have enough energy
- it takes UV photons to modify DNA
- and in most cases, enzymes will succeed in correcting any changes (or killing the cell)
So, until you have detected DNA emitting circularly-polarized UV photons, your "life-wave" theory is dead
- And if you do discover it, you will be dead, as your DNA self-destructs in the actinic glare of its own UV emissions, wreaking havoc throughout your body
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I'm pretty sure you wrong that wave functions can't be specific shapes btw
There are strict requirements on what a wave function can be. It has to be normalizable, and have continuous first and second derivatives.
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- So, in theory, a single photon could transfer immense amounts of information- evan au
Thanks Evan.
There is only a small amount of information you can transmit with a single photon. A single photon has a specific energy and a single polarization when measured. That's only two pieces of information.
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Evan au, I assume you believe that DNA is the blueprint for life correct? But have you personally or anybody else ever built a lifeform by constructing DNA? Therefore I conclude that the theory that DNA is a blueprint for life officially dead!
Is that a fair argument?
No, it's not anymore fair than asking me if I personally detected life-waves.
1. I don't have a lab
2. Even If I did, I think the reality of how a wave would be received and replicated would require super precise and complex machinery on the quantum level that would be super hard to pull off. Whatever theory of life you believe in, we know life has ridiculous abilities to construct things on a quantum level. Way above what we can be expected to do.
3. Life can be using things that haven't been discovered, not popular, not well understood, or with a current convenient analogy. For instance, maybe photons aren't the best way to go about the process. All particles have wave-functions and there are certainly many more types of particles we haven't discovered yet. Hacks in QM not discovered, it could be achieving the goal by creating waves with ultra high ability to reach it's desired target versus huge volume and thus are tough to detect. (assuming you could even do all the complicated things necessary to confirm you detected it)
I'm suggesting life is manipulating physics on a very high level whether me or you forumites have figured out exactly how or not.
However, regardless of whether I have zero'd in on the exact mechanisms of transferring information over space does not stop me from being able to explain a ton of things about evolution with the concept. There are many things besides capturing a lifewave and using it to construct a lifeform that can be used to infer its existence.
For instance, in universal evolution the role of the chromosome is to control the probability of where photons go by manipulating all of the paths it can take. I got there because I've been thinking about how QED (quantum electrodynamics) basically controls everything in QM for a long time. If any of you are not familiar with that I highly recommend looking into it. You can also learn from Richard Feynman which is cool too.
However, if you are not familiar with that, that's okay because my ultimate conclusion is super simple. The bigger the chromosome, the more precisely life is directing my theoretical "lifewaves". This also means the smaller the chromosome, the less precisely it is directing these waves and more will escape the body.
Smaller chromosomes maximizes signalling output into outerspace, bigger chromosomes maximizes health and energy efficiency. You can tell how the body is prioritizing the two by knowing the size. Telomeres are the endcaps of your chromosomes and can shrink or grow for many different reasons. You can look up lists and none of the things that change the size of telomeres would violate my intuition even a little. For instance, if you consume more calories, your telomeres will shrink, shrinking the chromosome. Well if your body has access to more calories it can parlay them into more lifewaves maximizing your blueprint in the universe by shrinking the telomeres, which it does. Diet and exercise would cause the body to prioritize energy efficiency over signalling out put and thus your telomeres can be expected to be bigger, which they are. Another example is if you view your environment as dangerous your telomeres would shrink. I'd interpret this as, if your body is not expecting as long of a lifespan due the unsafe environment, the optimal strategy is to create more signal while it still can versus prioritizing energy and health, thus your telomeres shrink. This also explains how mental things like stress, how well you are liked, wealth, safety, social status can have anything to do with the mechanics of how your chromosome replicates. You're own perceived level of success changes what the optimal strategy is. Telomere theory today makes no sense for a ton of reasons imo that I could continue to rant on, but is easily understood with Universal Evolution concepts.
Darwinism plays both sides of the complexity coin to explain things after the fact. For instance, 1 minute somebody could be telling me if you lined up all the DNA in your body it could leave the solar system and come back, and helicase can spin as fast as a jet turbine when replicating DNA, and then the next minute say life is too silly to replicate its chromosome when it's stressed, greatly increasing your odds of various life killing diseases. The plurality of the top ten killers are heavily affected by length of telomeres so life would have great incentive to halt the process. Life could replicate better if it wanted to, its just not optimal strategy in U.E. so it doesn't
Another example is with the sexes. How does it make sense that half of complex organisms (males) don't create offspring. What a waist! There are snails for instance that will mate with each other and then both lay eggs. This would be optimal if darwinism was correct, but the two sexes system dominates, why? Of course, in Universal Evolution every creature having offspring isn't optimal because the physical creation of life-waves is just as important as the physical creation of offspring. There are two goals for U.E. life-wave production and offspring production, thus the two sex system of male and female is ideal because they can specialize in tasks creating more as a group. Females specialize in creating offspring, men on signal. In light of U.E.'s chromosome theory we can confirm men are more ideal for creating signal as the y chromosome of males is physically smaller than that of womens extra x. In humans the y is 1/3rd the size of the x.
This explains many more things like, why is most DNA useless non-coding DNA with no function? Why is the entire genome in every cell instead of just the DNA of the relevant parts, or why don't men have two x's if it is ideal to do so? Why is DNA and other coiled structures helixes when information to construct life could potentially be stored in any shape?
Universal Evolution can explain a lot. A lot more than I've written in here.
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Life can be using things that haven't been discovered, not popular, not well understood, or with a current convenient analogy.
While that is true and it's okay to speculate, the lack of good evidence is going to be a big stumbling block to any such idea getting off of the ground when it comes to doing actual science.
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There is only a small amount of information you can transmit with a single photon. A single photon has a specific energy
True, but the energy of a photon is not inherently quantised (at least, to the measurement accuracy we can achieve).
- So this one parameter (energy α frequency) can take on many values (as seen in black-body radiation), and so convey much more than 1 bit of information.
- Photon Energy/Frequency is not a 1/0 binary property (unlike the detected polarization of said photon)
Saying that photon frequency/energy is not inherently quantised is independent of the fact that photons emitted by electrons in atomic shells is quantized.
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Reminds me of an old story.
An alien spaceship lands on Earth.
They say they just want to have a look at what we know.
We point out that, at least a good fraction of it is on the web.
They say thanks, do you mind if we take a copy?
We say OK.
They process the data and get a single metal rod.
And then, on that rod, they make a single mark- a scratch.
We ask why and they explain that it conveys the whole of the internet (at the time they copied it).
Just 1 scratch on a metal rod carries the whole of that data set.
Is that possible?
Well- sort of.
Every page on the web has an address and that address is a binary number.
Each page is, itself, a set of binary numbers. It's possible (by suitable encoding) to represent that as a single number Simplistically, you can imagine just stringing all the bits that get sent over the internet into one very long binary number.
Then you can look at all the "single binary number" representation of pages on the net.
One of them will be the longest.
You can then "pad out" all the other representations with zeroes until they are all the same length.
And then you can string together all the URLs (expanded into binary) and the corresponding page into another huge binary string of digits.
That records the whole of the internet into one single preposterously long number.
(You may need to juggle the encoding a bit- but it's possible in principle).
And then you can put a 0 and a binary point (it's like a decimal point) in front of that huge string of ones and zeroes.
And that gives you the binary representation of a fraction between zero and one.
And that's how far along the rod you make the scratch.
OK, there's a practical problem concerning the size of atoms in the rod but... we can do better than that.
We can use that fraction and multiply it by some length- say a metre.
And we can generate a photon with that wavelength.
That photon encodes the whole of the information on the web.
Nobody said it had to be practical.
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There is only a small amount of information you can transmit with a single photon. A single photon has a specific energy
True, but the energy of a photon is not inherently quantised (at least, to the measurement accuracy we can achieve).
- So this one parameter (energy α frequency) can take on many values (as seen in black-body radiation), and so convey much more than 1 bit of information.
- Photon Energy/Frequency is not a 1/0 binary property (unlike the detected polarization of said photon)
Saying that photon frequency/energy is not inherently quantised is independent of the fact that photons emitted by electrons in atomic shells is quantized.
We must recognize that when we talk about quantum mechanics anything you say is going to be taken in a million different ways. Energy in a photon is not quantized, it can be anything. Of course, in universities around the world professors are saying things like photons only have quantum bundles of energy. This is what e=hf means. When in reality that's not what that equation is saying at all. Pretty much photons are only going to have quantum energy levels if they come from some standard that made them as such, like in Bohr's hydrogen atom model where the next energy level is quantized compared to the last. In todays world things that sound "quantumy" just dominate, people love it. Photons are fundamental, have quantized characteristics, indivisible, 1 bit of quantum information, fundamentally probabilistic. Information has different meanings though and there are different ways of looking at q.m.
Take Einsteins perspective for instance. If you read directly from Einstein he talks about so many things so differently. He is always zero'd in on the why behinds things, which I love because most people just can't and then hide that by throwing a bunch of complexity at you. Most people today are completely unaware of how Einstein looks at QM. I don't think Einstein believes in the concept of fundamental particles or forces doing everything like we do today and it shows in so many ways in his writings.
Real life Einstein says things like the field is a real physical thing and particles can just be areas where the field is condensed. With ideas like this you can see how he can rationalize things like the equivalence of energy and mass. If we call a field energy and particles mass, then mass is just condensed energy and thus the two can translate into one another physically. The difference between a particle and a field can be quantitative not qualitative. Same thing between energy and mass, the difference between energy and mass is quantitative not qualitative.
Ideas like this is what makes Einstein so great because he has visual pictures to anchor the why behind things, compared to what most people do which is learn a math equation in class and then assume the whole world works like that equation says. They really can't maintain any level of thought on why that equation ought to exist, unless that equation is the derivative of another equation of course ::) so to them a electric field is just math lines on a paper, there is no more depth to that.
Lastly to get to my main point here. As was alluded to earlier, a wave-function for a photon is just the electromagnetic field. If the field is a real physical thing as Einstein suggested and a wave-function for a photon is just the E.M. field as was alluded to earlier than a wave-function can be real too. So,
1. If the wave-function has a real physical existence, it should not surprise if it can be replicated and shaped.
2. If Einsteins potential description of a photon is correct, which is that the photon is the collection of the surrounding field/energy, we should not be surprised that a single photon can have many characteristics all at once, because it is many things all at once!
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Please identify the guilty university.
Michigan State University
Then, in the words of Tom Lehrer
"We will sleep through all the lectures
And cheat in the exams
And we'll pass
And be forgotten with the rest."
Good to know that MSU students live up to the same standards as Harvard. If only the UK could maintain such uniformity!
Note: The Boss is an MSU alumna who actually stayed awake through Psychology 101. Respect!
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(by suitable encoding)
Aye, there's the rub. (Shakespeare)
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But seriously, folks, I've always wondered how complex biological reactions like alien tissue rejection manage to happen so quickly, almost as though DNA does transmit some kind of pilot signal. But as with all observations, it's important to recognise the inherent bias of our own limitations - humans are pretty slow to think and act, compared with smaller animals, so a single cell may have a very different time base from our brains.
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(by suitable encoding)
Aye, there's the rub. (Shakespeare)
No, not really.
There may be better or worse encodings but "Every web page in order ( by URL) then every page, as a binary file" would work.
You can encode the whole of humanity's documented knowledge on a single photon.
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alien tissue rejection manage to happen so quickly
It takes a few days for your immune system to realise that you are under attack by an alien virus and mount a response.
A transplanted heart is not actively attacking you, but the surgery certainly looks like some kind of attack. So a few days to react seems about similar (if you aren't taking your anti-rejection medications meticulously).
In fact, your body does not wait for the attack, but is pre-primed to react to anything that seems alien. There are a bunch of randomly-generated antibodies floating around your system. As a child, your thymus removes the ones that react to "self", leaving all the others to detect anything that looks "alien". As soon as anything "alien" appears on the scene, one of these pre-built antibodies will latch onto it, and start a cascade of escalating immune responses.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thymus#Function
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alien tissue rejection manage to happen so quickly
It takes a few days for your immune system to realise that you are under attack by an alien virus and mount a response.
A transplanted heart is not actively attacking you, but the surgery certainly looks like some kind of attack. So a few days to react seems about similar (if you aren't taking your anti-rejection medications meticulously).
In fact, your body does not wait for the attack, but is pre-primed to react to anything that seems alien. There are a bunch of randomly-generated antibodies floating around your system. As a child, your thymus removes the ones that react to "self", leaving all the others to detect anything that looks "alien". As soon as anything "alien" appears on the scene, one of these pre-built antibodies will latch onto it, and start a cascade of escalating immune responses.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thymus#Function
Is there anything in childhood diseases that could prevent the complete removal of self attacking antibodies? Some diseases actually cause the body to attack itself. Could there be a clue in what you said?
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Some diseases actually cause the body to attack itself. Could there be a clue in what you said?
Yes.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thymus#Autoimmune_disease