In Part 3 of “Thermodynamics of Life”, Professor Marc Henry, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, continues his deep conversation with Dr. Klaus Schustereder—this time focusing on one radical question:

Does consciousness come before matter?

Building on the previous episode’s insight that life and water are universal properties of the cosmos, Henry now turns to the quantum origins of consciousness, the structure of matter, and the thermodynamic foundations of health and disease.

He argues that modern science made a fundamental mistake by assuming that matter creates consciousness. Drawing on quantum physics, relativity, and thermodynamics, he reverses this view: consciousness precedes matter and shapes it through information.

The “vacuum” of quantum physics, he explains, is not empty but a field of pure potential—a quantum ether that generates both matter and energy. Matter is not a solid substance but the visible outcome of invisible fields in vibration. Everything we experience—objects, bodies, planets, stars—is ultimately a pattern of coherent fields structured by information.

Key Concepts & Themes

• Consciousness before matter – Why many philosophers and early quantum pioneers (Planck, Schrödinger, Heisenberg) placed consciousness at the root of reality.

• Information as the true “substance” – Matter appears when consciousness imprints information into fields, especially water.

• Water as the bridge – Water stores, transmits, and organizes information, linking mind, body, and environment.

• Mass, matter, and fields – Matter is an effect of interacting quantum fields; mass belongs to space-time itself.

• Hierarchy of creation – Consciousness → Information → Water → Matter → Life.

• Coherence over structure – Coherence (ordered vibration) is the real key to life and healing.

• Collective consciousness – Individual minds combine into larger fields, echoing Jung’s collective unconscious.

The Physics of Life and Healing

Using Ilya Prigogine’s thermodynamics of irreversible processes, Henry describes life as a continuous flow of entropy—an ongoing exchange of energy and information that maintains order. When this flow is disturbed, illness appears. Health is therefore a dynamic balance of entropy and information between body, mind, and environment.

Henry contrasts conventional medicine’s focus on chemical matter with a wider quantum view in which healing can also occur through information and coherence: consciousness, vibration, light, and the memory properties of water. Practices such as meditation or the use of “informed” water can, in this framework, reorganize the informational patterns in the body’s water matrix.

“Consciousness acts on information. Information shapes water. And water organizes life.”

Cancer and other diseases are thus reinterpreted not simply as genetic defects, but as disturbances in entropy flow and coherence. Restoring health means restoring the correct flow of energy, information, and order within living water.

Henry concludes that medicine must evolve beyond purely chemical interventions toward a medicine of consciousness, where the healer works not only with matter, but with the information carried by water, light, and awareness itself.