A new approach to a once-farfetched theory is making it plausible that the brain functions like a quantum computer.
.. Over the past decade, however, growing evidence suggests that certain biological systems might employ quantum mechanics. In photosynthesis, for example, quantum effects help plants turn sunlight into fuel. Scientists have also proposedthat migratory birds have a “quantum compass” enabling them to exploit Earth’s magnetic fields for navigation, or that the human sense of smell could be rooted in quantum mechanics.
.. Fisher has rephrased the central question—is quantum processing happening in the brain?—in such a way that it lays out a road map to test the hypothesis rigorously.
.. Since nearly all psychiatric medications are complicated molecules, he focused on one of the most simple, lithium, which is just one atom—a spherical cow, so to speak, that would be an easier model to study than Prozac, for instance. The analogy is particularly appropriate because a lithium atom is a sphere of electrons surrounding the nucleus, Fisher said. He zeroed in on the fact that the lithium available by prescription from your local pharmacy is mostly a common isotope called lithium-7. Would a different isotope, like the much more rare lithium-6, produce the same results?
.. Over the course of his five-year quest, Fisher has identified just one credible candidate for storing quantum information in the brain: phosphorus atoms
.. Others see no need to invoke quantum processing to explain brain function. “The evidence is building up that we can explain everything interesting about the mind in terms of interactions of neurons,” said Paul Thagard, a neurophilosopher at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada
Computer solves a major time travel problem
The ‘grandfather paradox’ of time travel has been puzzling philosophers, quantum physicists and novelists for years. Now there’s an answer as Cathal O’Connell reports.
The breakthrough involves the grandfather paradox – that favourite plaything of philosophers where somebody travels into the past and kills their own grandfather, preventing the existence of one of their parents, and therefore their own.
.. The computer’s second solution is more interesting. The snag is it only works if the father also has the ability to travel in time.
The story goes like this.
In 1954 Marty’s father George travels forward in time one year to 1955, when he impregnates Marty’s mother Lorraine before immediately returning back to 1954 – just as his future son, Marty, arrives and kills him.
Because George’s quick foray into the future allowed him to already conceive his son, the paradox disappears.
A Capella Science – Bohemian Gravity!
Is string theory right?
Is it just fantasy?
Caught in the landscape,
Out of touch with reality
Compactified
On S5 or T*S3Space is a pure void
Why should it be stringy?
Because it’s quantum not classical
Nonrenormalizable
Any way you quantize
You’ll encounter infinity
You seeQuanta
Must interact
Via paths we understand
Using Feynman diagrams
Often, they will just rebound
But now and then they go another way
A quantum
Loooooop
Infinities will make you cry
Unless you can renormalize your model
Of baryons, fermions
And all other states of matterCurved space:
The graviton
Can be thought of as a field
But these infinities are real
In a many-body
Loop diagram
Our results diverge no matter what we do…
A Quantum Soup (any way you quantize)
Kiss your fields goodbye
Guess Einstein’s theory wasn’t complete at all!I see extended 1-D objects with no mass
What’s their use? What’s their use? Can they give us quark plasma?
What to minimize?
What functional describes this
String?
Nambu-Goto! (Nambu-Goto)
Nambu-Goto! (Nambu-Goto)
How to quantize I don’t know
Polyakov!
I’m just a worldsheet, please minimize me
He’s just a worldsheet from a string theory
Reperametrized by a Weyl symmetry!Fermi, Bose, open, closed, orientable?
Vibrations
Modes! They become particles (particles!)
Vibrations
They become particles (particles!)
Vibrations
They become particles (particles!)
Become particles (particles!)
Become particles (many many many many particle…)
Modes modes modes modes modes modes modes!
Oh mamma mia mamma mia,
Such a sea of particles!
A tachyon, with a dilaton and gravity-vity-VITY(rock out!)
Now we need ten dimensions and I’ll tell you why
(anomaly cancellation!)
So to get down to 4D we compactify!
Oh, Kahler!
(Kahler manifold)
Manifolds must be Kahler!
(Complex Reimannian symplectic form)
If we wanna preserve
Any of our super-symmetry(Superstrings of type I, IIa and IIb)
(Heterotic O and Heterotic E)
(All are one through S and T duality)
(Thank you Ed Witten for that superstring revolution and your new M-theory!)(Maldecena!)
(Super-Yang-Mills!)
(Type IIB String!)
Dual! Dual!
(In the AdS/CFT)
(Holography!)Molecules and atoms
Light and energy
Time and space and matter
All from one united
TheoryAny way you quantize…
The Multiverse Idea Is Rotting Culture
What looks at first glance like an opening up of possibilities is actually an attack on the human imagination.
What looks at first glance like an opening up of possibilities is actually an attack on the human imagination.
.. I’m not really interested in the science of multiverse theory so much as its impact on the way we think about ourselves, but it helps to state the problem. That problem is wave function collapse. At a quantum level, particles don’t exist as solid objects in space but as probability waves describing the various positions that could potentially be occupied.
.. In his 1951 book Der evangelische Glaube und das Denken der Gegenwart, the German academic Karl Heim gave us a perfectly workable answer: God did it. The Almighty, in His infinite benevolence, carefully tends to the waveform collapse of every particle, working on the tiniest levels to create a world kinder to human life.
.. There’s no way we could ever carry out any experiment to test for the multiverse’s existence in the world, because it’s not in our world.
.. because if it does exist the implications are horrifying. Right now, infinite versions of yourself are dying in really horrible ways, not in spite of the fact that you’re lazily giving answers to a New Scientistreporter, but because of it. Every second you live, their suffering increases. If you stand on a cliff-edge and decide not to die, how many billions are smashed on the rocks? Jump now, and save them all.
.. the ‘Mandela Effect,’
.. The theory posits small quantum fluctuations that allow people to slip through the cracks between universes, arriving in a world where everything looks so similar that they don’t realize this is not their real home and these people are not their real friends. It’s not until something big happens—Nelson Mandela’s funeral, for instance—that they notice. But didn’t he die in prison in the 1980s? Surely I can’t have been wrong about that. There must be a simpler explanation. I’m a voyager from another world.
.. It goes back to Leibniz, who got analytical philosophers talking about contingency in terms of ‘possible worlds’ for tedious centuries
.. The multiverse excuses every injustice; it’s all been made good somewhere else