Preface: Stones, Light and the Physics Between Them

Note

Medical and safety notice. Please read before anything else. This book is a review of solid-state physics, meteoritics, tissue optics and photobiology, with mathematical models. It is not medical advice. It does not claim that any mineral, crystal, meteorite, earthing product or red-light device can diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease, and nothing in it should be used in place of care from a qualified professional. Near-infrared light is invisible, so the eye’s blink reflex gives no protection: a bright near-infrared source can heat and damage the retina without the user noticing. Never look into a red or near-infrared panel, laser or LED array, and wear protective goggles rated for the wavelengths in use. People who are pregnant, who take medicines that make the skin sensitive to light, who have a history of skin cancer, epilepsy or eye disease, or who have an implanted device should speak to a doctor before using any light device. Acids used to etch metal, mentioned in Chapter 8, should be handled only by a laboratory.

People have held quartz for luck, worn tourmaline for its “negative ions”, kept fragments of iron meteorites as treasures and, more recently, bought panels of red and near-infrared lights for their skin and muscles. Around each of these objects a vocabulary of “energy”, “frequency” and “vibration” has grown up. This book asks what the physics behind each object actually is, how large its effects are, and which of the claims made for it have been tested.

The answers turn out to be more interesting than the marketing. Quartz is genuinely piezoelectric: squeezed, it produces a voltage, and the quartz resonators in every watch and phone are among the most precise mechanical oscillators ever made. Tourmaline genuinely produces electric charge when it is warmed, a property that puzzled Dutch gem traders three centuries ago. The crossing bands inside an iron meteorite are a record of cooling over millions of years in the core of a shattered small planet, and they cannot be made in any laboratory. And red and near-infrared light do act on cells, with a guideline-supported use in cancer care, through a mechanism still under study. In each case the book sets the real effect beside the claims and asks how big it is.

What this book is and is not

This is a book of models and reviews. Each chapter states an established piece of physics or biology and runs it in a short Python program so that the reader can change the numbers and see what happens. Unless a source is given, the numbers in the programs are illustrative; they show how an argument works, not measurements of any object or person. Where the book proposes how a model applies, it says so in a hypothesis box, with the result that would show it to be wrong.

How to read the boxes

As in the other books of the 5D Library, different kinds of statement are kept apart.

Evidence

Evidence boxes report published findings, with their sources.

Calculation

Calculation boxes give formulas and short Python programs. Every program runs as printed with a standard Python 3 installation and nothing else, and its output is shown underneath it.

Hypothesis · not established

Hypothesis boxes hold the author’s ideas. They are labelled “not established”, and they say what result would show them to be wrong.

Source text

Source text boxes quote the classical texts, with the author’s translation.

Note

Note boxes give cautions and explain choices.

The plan of the book

Quartz and piezoelectricity. Why α-quartz is piezoelectric and calcite is not, the charge and energy from squeezing a quartz crystal, and the equivalent circuit and quality factor of a quartz resonator.
Tourmaline and pyroelectricity. The polar crystal class of tourmaline, the voltage and field produced by a warming of a few degrees, and how its charge compares with the ions already in a room’s air.
Iron meteorites and the Widmanstätten pattern. Kamacite and taenite, the iron–nickel phase diagram, the Arrhenius law for diffusion, and why the pattern records cooling rates of millions of years.
Light in tissue. The optical window, absorption and scattering in skin, the effective attenuation coefficient, and how much red and near-infrared light reaches the brain through the skull.
Photobiomodulation. Cytochrome c oxidase, nitric oxide and ATP, the biphasic dose response, and the clinical evidence and its limits.
The Schumann resonances and earthing. The resonances of the cavity between the Earth and the ionosphere, why they lie lower than the ideal formula predicts, and the electrical model of a grounded body.
The classics of stones. Shen Kuo’s account of a fallen star, Du Wan’s Stone Catalogue of Cloudy Forest, and the minerals of the Shennong Bencao Jing and the Bencao Gangmu.
Field checks and a pre-registered experiment. Four physical checks with a multimeter, a magnet, a loupe and an irradiance meter, and a double-blind randomised crossover trial of red and near-infrared light against a heat-matched sham.

This edition

This is version 1.0.0, the first complete edition: a preface and eight chapters, in Chinese and English. Corrections, and references the author has missed, are welcome through the 5D Library website.

Disclosure

The author and his group operate websites on frequency and resonance (sacredcubit.com and tensorcoil.com) and on health topics (ketohackers.com and nadplusnadplus.com), and so have a commercial interest in some of the subjects of this book. The book does not promote any stone, crystal, meteorite, earthing product, light panel or other product, and names no seller. All the code and the study protocol are published openly for anyone to check.

Fan, Y. (2026). Crystal Piezoelectricity, Iron-Nickel Meteorites and Photobiomodulation: Alpha-Quartz, Tourmaline Pyroelectricity, Widmanstätten Diffusion and Near-Infrared Cytochrome c Oxidase in Solid-State Physics and Biophotonics [晶体压电性、铁镍陨石与光生物调节] (Version 1.0.0). 5D Library. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23698498 · Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).