It was already guessed that the membrane’s resting potential is of electrostatic origin [122, 73, 75, 74, 123]. When ions are confined in a closed volume, they exist in a state of thermodynamic and electrical equilibrium. However, those equilibrium states cannot be discussed independently. We must discuss them in a non-disciplinary way because the participating ions belong simultaneously to the disciplines of electricity and thermodynamics; furthermore, we must cross the borderline between discrete and continuous points of view of nature [22]. Furthermore, the features of living matter may change when measured in physics laboratories as usual. When measuring them, we must consider that ”the construction is different from anything we have yet tested in the physical laboratory” [12].
In the absence of external influences (that includes the lack of a separating membrane), both gradients are balanced and are at zero. When something perturbs this state, the system attempts to find a new balanced state, using temporal processes. The details of how it reserves and restores its balanced state are discussed in section 2.7. In this scenario, two interactions can influence the ’carrier’ (the ion). We discussed in section 2.4 and in [22] that those phenomena in living matter need deriving and applying ’non-ordinary’ laws of science, and the laws of motion of biology can describe the time course of those processes. Fundamentally, due to the mixing of interaction speeds, considering only one of the interactions leads to fundamentally incorrect conclusions.