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On Masses and Muses:
The Quantum Narrative
Part 2 By R.G. Uchtmann
The basic Runic term of mannaz or Mannus is “ma”, this is “measure”, derived from Indo-European “mn-s” or “men” with the meaning “to think something over”, to imagine, to think bright. The term “ma” is also related to the Irish-Celtic god Mananan Mac Lir, god of the sea and the dead, who indeed represented the heavenly waters and the moon as the place of the dead. But it is also said that he brought the drowned ones to the blissful island. The surf waves were called “horses of Mac Lir”. His relation to death and rebirth is further expressed by the magical food of his ever refilling moon kettle, giving immortality and invisibility to the gods. The Greeks knew Minos, whose bull, the Mino-Taurus, represents the moon bull or the moon cows. In India a myhtical king, Manu, is known who introduced the caste laws (laws of Manu). In Persia lived a Manus who tried to reform the Zoroastrian religion and to connect it to Christianity.
All these names are related to the moon god, and the Germanic peoples worshipped him as Mannus (Mani in the Edda) if we follow Tacitus and his description. According to Tacitus Mannus was seen as the son of Tuisto (Odin), who himself was seen as a sprout of earth and not of heaven. At the same time Mannus was regarded as the forefather and founder of their people, who himself had three sons that represented the three “tribes”, branches or ways of life, this is: nutrition, defence and teaching.
Mannus represented not men only, but women as well and stood for the human being in general. In a Latavian myth the moon god counts his children, this is the stars. This role shows him as the first teacher of mathematics and as a scientist. And as he was responsible for the transition from death to life and from life to death too, he was - as the god of devine knowledge - the lord of initiation as well. [1]
Thus Mannus can be seen as the “angelic” human archetype as such – neither man nor woman but both united and synthetisised into a third at the same time -, the matrix for the human being as a tinker, measurer, thinker, musician, experimenter, artist, poet and writer - man, the cultural being. As the Germanic groups developed they needed more differentiation, and three more specialized ways of life developed. Any “way” had its own rites, songs, myths, leaders, initiations and shamans and had - in contrast to the Indian caste system - equal rights. Even the rights of the sexes were equal before the Romans and later the Catholic Christians under Charlemagne conquered the territories and errected a hierarchic top-down and interial patriachal system that used the Germanic martial law as the permanent means of adiministration with the normally temporary war chiefs (the dukes) as from God and the emperor authorized and ever lasting leaders. Consequently the on the whole more democratic system of “tings” (councils) - the former administration type in peacetime - eroded or went underground.[2] And with it the entire elite of the old times was damned to vanish and was successively replaced by Christian priests and turned rulers. The later witch-hunts (the now secret tings were denounced as Witches’ Sabbaths then), the excessive carnival festivities and the reactions of the authories show that they did not vanish at all, but stayed a serious factor of resistance and self-assertion for centuries.[3]
The sketched problem is well known up to day and plays not only a major role in defining different ways of logic, namely “classical logic” and “intuitive logic”. Whereas classical logic departs from the concept of the excluded third or middle, intuitive logic includes the third or the middle. It is impossible to say that one of the logics is false, because they simply describe and aim at different contextual universes, a functional and a disfunctional one.
The potential synthesis of both perspectives are the living beings, even if first consciously actualized on relatively recent evolutionary strata by using the “trick” of “conceptual consciousness”. Any living structure must balance between two cardinal universal forces, this is “inertia” and “entropy”; but only anthropoids learned not only how to emerge/constitute consciousness by using this trick, but to influence, readjust, change and create reality as well.[4] Humans were/are the first beings on this planet who made the inside cardinal, to the very source of their beings and souls[5].
Classical bipolar logic is entirely functional and can be seen as describing syntactic - this is text- or context-inherent - relations. As in abstract mathematics no reference is needed, the discourse universe feeds itself by axiomatic assumptions. This system works properly to the point where disturbances or deviances appear and a new description of the context is needed. Now a “false” logic (seen from a “classical” system inherent point of view) must emerge that proves and srutinizes the semantic relations. To do so the third must been included, and an apparently disfunctional logic gets a look-in.
The disfunctional or intuitive logic is entropic and prevents the syntax from being homogenized and destroyed within increasingly unconscious inertia. This is that the included middle allows semantic back-binds to relocate the system. Early specialists to do this task were the shamans who dealt with disturbances and deviances of any kind - this is individual, social or global deviances or disturbances like natural disasters, illness, “madness” etc.
It is not easy to designate the “space-time-point” where the originally intuitive logic flopped into a classical one, but the above quoted Pythia story, the already mentioned Chinese reformation of the “ley system” etc. imply to refer to the mythological shift from “snake” (Python, Dragon) to “sun” (Apollo) in order to mark this point. To us the Greek example (aside the Egyptian) is particularily relevant because it were the Greek philosophers that influenced the development of the occidental states, religions and sciences most.
The mentioned mythological shift from snake to sun was accompanied and continued by philosophical ideas that drove the matter to new degrees of abstraction. Beginning with Socrates and Plato and their concepts of epistemic resp. definitory logic, a “realm of ideas” was defined that is not connected to our “real world” of daily matters; this is: we and all other objects are not more than shadows, shades or more or less bad copies of some originals that are stored in the “realm of ideas”. Here the later ideas of Augustine, that were fundamental in the raise and the conception of the Christian churches, departed. Augustine imagined an isolated god – like an idea in Plato’s approach – that is inaccessible for mankind forever; this is inter alia that the “original sin”cannot made undone by any individual efforts.
After these operations the god finally was excluded, but was lifted up as the one and only god as well. As an inevitable inversion, mankind was seen as excluded from god now, damned to live as sexually opposed hard workers in blood, sweat and tears to compensate the not compensable original sin. The tautology of this construction is obviously.
Matter metric dimension relative
Spirit dimensionless relative
Not the child (micro quantum) is meant, but the spirit (macro quantum)
Shu = Spirit
7. Nuit – The Circumference
Subject, object, absolute, relative and quantum Das dritte als funktion der zwei
'infinity'
derives from self-referentiality. No mind no time no mind no
Aristotele shows the exit
Narration: now we learn how to write with “matter”. Endophysics and Semiophysics
8. Hadith - “Narrative ‘Trulyness’”
9. Shu - The Included Third or Middle
The three states, a non-local, a local and a third one - that probably unifies locality and non-locality and adds some new quality as well - describe the world we are living in from a local standpoint. To gain relative locality “mass” is needed, and in the evolution of structures in the realm of locality mass orientated (attraction and repulsion) primary codes that do not process signs but information emerge first[6]. For them the principle of signal locality is valid. Some past and recent findings seem to show that DNA itself emits and radiates light[7].
Finally, Bogoras discusses the theory of "mana": the pre-animistic, impersonal conception of religion. If there is a "supreme being", it is passive and aloof. The self and the universe are one. There is no death, only eternal life. Other religious ideas evolved out of the mana concept, including dualism, and it is only with the separation of self from the universe that a fear of death arose.
From:
Jack Sarfatti <sarfatti@pacbell.net>
Good - also add this:
Precise information on the presentation is at
http://www.bizspirit.com/science/Sarfatti,%20Jack%20workshop.html
A few more technical points of clarification.
John Cramer wrote:
"But is quantum mechanics non-linear?[8]
Atomic physics experiments have been used by several experimental groups to test Weinberg's non-linear theory. So far, these tests have all been negative, indicating that any non-linearities in the quantum formalism are extremely small, if they exist at all. These negative results are not surprising, however, because the atomic transitions used involve only a few electron-volts of energy. If quantum mechanics does have non-linear properties, they would expected to depend on energy and to appear only at a very high energy scale and particularly at the highest energy densities.
Weinberg-Polchinski tests should be made, if possible, with the highest energy particle accelerators. Perhaps then we can find out what connections might be made with Polchinski's EPR telephone."
This is the Sufi Tale of The Pundits shining a strong light in the wrong part of the dark cave.
"The Question is: What is The Question?" John Archibald Wheeler
Obviously the above tests will all fail because micro-quantum theory is strictly linear. Macro-quantum theory is a very different story. Einstein's general theory of relativity violates certain aspects of his special theory of relativity, the same is true here. "More is different" (P.W. Anderson "A Career in Theoretical Physics" World). The physical conscious mind field is a LARGE thing immune from environmental decoherence. BTW the dynamical equation for the conscious mind field Psi is something like
ihPsi,t + aPsi + b|Psi|^2Psi = environmental inputs from brain signals
Cramer continues:
"Thus, the Copenhagen interpretation is not "robust" because it is inconsistent with a tiny modification of the standard formalism. The transactional interpretation, on the other hand, can easily accommodate this modification of the formalism and is robust enough to be tested and verified (or falsified) by the same effect. If quantum mechanics has any detectable nonlinearity, we get a faster-than-light and backwards-in-time telephone."
This is no news to Bohmians. See "The Undivided Universe" by Bohm & Hiley especially p. 30 (hardback) and 14.6.
On Jan 17, 2005, at 10:27 AM, Victor Martinez wrote:
S.F. NORTH BEACH BOHEMIAN THEORETICAL PHYSICIST Dr JACK SARFATTI WILL DELIVER A MAJOR SPEECH ON 'QUANTUM SIGNAL NONLOCALITY' PURPORTING TO EXPLAIN THE SCIENTIFIC REMOTE VIEWING EXPERIMENTS CARRIED OUT BY Drs HAROLD PUTHOFF AND RUSSELL TARG AT THE STANFORD RESEARCH INSTITUTE IN THE 1970s,... IS THIS THE FINAL ANSWER ON THIS HIGHLY-CHARGED MATTER IN THE WORLD OF PHYSICS? ATTEND THE SEMINAR AND FIND OUT!
Dr JACK SARFATTI:
sarfatti@pacbell.net
Dr HAROLD E PUTHOFF:
Puthoff@aol.com
Dr RUSSELL E TARG:
radiant@pacbell.net
Dr JOHN G CRAMER:
http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/cramer.html
cramer@phys.washington.edu
JACK SARFATTI: BTW Victor, as far as I know I am the only one who has linked RV to signal nonlocality with possible exception of Brian Josephson and Fotini Pallikari though I am not aware if they explicitly say it definitively in writing? This is the main focus of my talk in Santa Fe, New Mexico on April 24, 2005 at the 7th International Conference on Science and Consciousness
http://www.bizspirit.com/science/Sarfatti,%20Jack%20workshop.html
This is the physics for the CIA/DIA/SRI RV work of Puthoff & Targ.
MARTINEZ: DOC: Here's a paper I found which purports to explain Drs Puthoff/Targ's RV work; I like his explanation much better than Antony Valentini's at:
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0112151
I have a degree/teaching credential in journalism/English, NOT in physics!
Dr SARFATTI: Yes, this is exactly what I have been talking about. The macro-quantum theory is nonlinear in the sense below. The giant vacuum coherent Tsunami local "world hologram" wave Psi obeys an equation in ordinary space something like:
D^uDuPsi + m^2Psi + b|Psi|^2Psi ~ 0
Where Du is the Einstein general relativity covariant partial derivative:
m^2 < 0, b > 0
The all important nonlinearity is the term:
b|Psi|^2Psi
We also have a formally similar local hologram giant quantum wave that pilots our brain function. That is our conscious mind field. We are conscious because there is direct feedback from the material brain to the mind field from the nonlinearity presponse term absent in micro-quantum theory.
PW Anderson in "More is different" showed that the giant quantum wave has a "phase rigidity" that makes it immune to the environmental decoherence of Zurek that Tegmark attacked Penrose and Hameroff with. Stapp had a detailed model of a nonlinear QM of mind with application to retro-PK paranormal data. Physics Today virtually roasted Stapp alive for his heresy even though his paper is not wrong.
This is the important part:
3. NONLINEAR QUANTUM MECHANICS AND SUPERLUMINAL LOOPHOLES
This prohibition against superluminal communication, as stated above, is a part of standard quantum mechanics. However, this prohibition is broken if quantum mechanics is allowed to be slightly "non-linear", a technical term meaning that when quantum waves are superimposed they may generate a small cross-term not present in the standard formalism.
Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate for his theoretical work in unifying the electromagnetic and weak interactions, investigated a theory which introduces small non-linear corrections to standard quantum mechanics [13]. The onset of non-linear behavior is seen in other areas of physics, e.g., laser light in certain media, and, he suggested, might also be present but unnoticed in quantum mechanics. Weinberg's non-linear QM subtly alters certain properties of the standard theory, producing new physical effects that can be detected through precise measurements.
Two years after Weinberg's non-linear QM theory was published, Joseph Polchinski published a paper demonstrating that Weinberg's non-linear corrections upset the balance in quantum mechanics that prevents superluminal communication using EPR experiments [14]. Through the new non-linear effects, separated measurements on the same quantum system begin to "talk" to each other and faster-than-light and/or backward-in-time signaling becomes possible. Polchinski describes such an arrangement as an "EPR telephone."
The Weinberg/Polchinski work had implications that are devastating for the Copenhagen representation of the wave function as "observer knowledge." Polchinski has shown that a tiny non-linear modification transforms the "hidden" nonlocality of the standard QM formalism into a manifest property that can be used for nonlocal observer-to-observer communication.
This is completely inconsistent with the Copenhagen "knowledge" interpretation.
Thus, the Copenhagen interpretation is not "robust" because it is inconsistent with a tiny modification of the standard formalism. The transactional interpretation, on the other hand, can easily accommodate this modification of the formalism and is robust enough to be tested and verified (or falsified) by the same effect. If quantum mechanics has any detectable nonlinearity, we get a faster-than-light and backwards-in-time telephone.
But is quantum mechanics non-linear?
Atomic physics experiments have been used by several experimental groups to test Weinberg's non-linear theory. So far, these tests have all been negative, indicating that any non-linearities in the quantum formalism are extremely small, if they exist at all. These negative results are not surprising, however, because the atomic transitions used involve only a few electron-volts of energy. If quantum mechanics does have non-linear properties, they would expected to depend on energy and to appear only at a very high energy scale and particularly at the highest energy densities.
Weinberg-Polchinski tests should be made, if possible, with the highest energy particle accelerators. Perhaps then we can find out what connections might be made with Polchinski's EPR telephone." ---------------------------------------- Dr JOHN G CRAMER, Professor, Dept of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle:
http://mist.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/qm_nl.html
QUANTUM NONLOCALITY AND THE POSSIBILITY OF SUPERLUMINAL EFFECTS
Web site:
http://weber.u.washington.edu/~jcramer
ABSTRACT
EPR experiments demonstrate that standard quantum mechanics exhibits the property of nonlocality, the enforcement of correlations between separated parts of an entangled quantum systems across spacelike separations. Nonlocality will be clarified using the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the possibility of superluminal effects (e.g., faster-than-light communication) from nonlocality and non-linear quantum mechanics will be examined.
1. BELL'S THEOREM AND QUANTUM NONLOCALITY
Albert Einstein disliked quantum mechanics, as developed by Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac, and others, because it had many strange features that ran head-on into Einstein's finely honed intuition and understanding of how a proper universe ought to operate. Over the years he developed a list of objections to the various peculiarities of quantum mechanics.
At the top of Einstein's list of complaints was what he called "spooky actions at a distance". Einstein's "spookiness" is now called nonlocality, the mysterious ability of Nature to enforce correlations between separated but entangled parts of a quantum system that are out of speed-of-light contact, to reach faster-than-light across vast spatial distances or even across time itself to ensure that the parts of a quantum system are made to match.
To be more specific, locality means that isolated parts of any quantum mechanical system out of speed-of-light contact with other parts of that system are allowed to retain definite relationships or correlations only through memory of previous contact. Nonlocality means that in quantum systems correlations not possible through simple memory are somehow being enforced faster-than-light across space and time. Nonlocality, peculiar though it is, is a fact of quantum systems which has been repeatedly demonstrated in laboratory experiments.
In 1935 Einstein, with his collaborators Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, published a list of objections to quantum mechanics which has come to be known as "the EPR paper" [1], in which they lodged three complaints against quantum mechanics, one of which was nonlocality. The EPR paper argued that "no real change" could take place in one system as a result of a measurement performed on a distant second system, as quantum mechanics requires.
A decades-long uproar in the physics literature followed the publication of the EPR paper. The founders of quantum mechanics tried to come to grips with the EPR criticisms, and a long inconclusive battle ensued. EPR supporter David Bohm introduced the notion of a "local hidden variable" theory, a partially reformulated alternative to orthodox quantum mechanics that would replace quantum mechanics with a theoretical structure omitting the paradoxical features to which the EPR paper had objected. In Bohm's hidden-variable alternative, all correlation were established locally at sub-light speed.
Working physicists, however, paid little attention to hidden variable theories. Bohm's approach was far less useful than orthodox quantum mechanics for calculating the behavior of physical systems. Since it was apparently impossible to resolve the EPR/hidden-variable debate by performing an experiment, physicists tended to ignore the whole controversy. The EPR objections were considered problems for philosophers and mystics, not Real Physicists.
In 1964 this perception changed. John S. Bell, a theoretical physicist working at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, proved an amazing theorem which demonstrated that certain experimental tests could distinguish the predictions of quantum mechanics from those of any local hidden-variable theory [2,3]. Bell, following the lead of Bohm, had based his calculations not on measurements of position and momentum, the focus of Einstein's arguments, but on measurements of the states of polarization of photons of light.
Excited atoms often produce two photons in a process called a "cascade" involving two successive quantum jumps. Because of angular momentum conservation, if the atom begins and ends with no net angular momentum, the two photons must have correlated polarizations. When such photons travel in opposite directions, angular momentum conservation requires that if one of the photons is measured to have some definite polarization state, the other photon is required by quantum mechanics to have exactly the same polarization state, no matter what measurement is made.
Such correlated photon pairs are said to be in an "entangled" quantum states. Experimental tests of Bell's theorem, often called "EPR experiments", usually use entangled photons from such an atomic cascade. EPR experiments measure the coincident arrival of two such photons at opposite ends of the apparatus, as detected by quantum-sensitive photomultiplier tubes after each photon has passed through a polarizing filter or splitter.
The photomultipliers at opposite ends of the apparatus produce electrical pulses which, when they occur at the same time, are recorded as a "coincidence" or two photon event. The rate R(q) of such coincident events is measured when the two polarization axes are oriented so as to make a relative angle of q. Then q is changed and the rate measurement is repeated until a complete map of R(q) vs. q is developed.
Bell's theorem deals with the way in which the coincidence rate R(q) of an EPR experiment changes as q starts from zero and becomes progressively larger. Bell proved mathematically that for all local hidden-variable theories R(q) must decrease linearly (or less) as q increases, i.e., the fastest possible decrease in R(q) is proportional to q. On the other hand quantum mechanics predicts that the coincidence rate is R(q) = R(0) Cos2(q), so that for small q it will decrease roughly as q2. Therefore, quantum mechanics and Bell's Theorem make qualitatively different predictions about EPR measurements.
When two theories make such distinctly different predictions about the outcome of the same experiment, a measurement can be performed to test them. For quantum mechanics and Bell's theorem this crucial EPR experiment was performed first in 1972 by Freedman and Clauser[4], who demonstrated a 6s (six standard deviation) violation of Bell's inequality. A decade later the Aspect group in France performed a series of elegant "loophole closing" experiments that demonstrated 46s violations of Bell's inequality [5,6].
In these experiments the predictions of quantum mechanics were always confirmed, and very significant violations of the Bell Inequalities are demonstrated.
When the first experimental results from EPR experiments became available, they were widely interpreted as a demonstration that hidden variable theories must be wrong. This interpretation changed when it was realized that Bell's theorem assumed a local hidden variable theory, and that nonlocal hidden variable theories can also be constructed that violate Bell's theorem and agree with the experimental measurements.
The assumption made by Bell that had been put to the test, therefore, was the assumption of locality, not the assumption of hidden variables. Locality, as promoted by Einstein, was found to be in conflict with experiment. Or to put it another way, the intrinsic nonlocality of quantum mechanics has been demonstrated by the experimental tests of Bell's theorem. It has been experimentally demonstrated that nature arranges the correlations between the polarization of the two photons by some faster-than-light mechanism that violates Einstein's intuitions about the intrinsic locality of all natural processes.
What Einstein called "spooky actions at a distance" are an important part of the way nature works at the quantum level. Einstein's faster-than-light spooks cannot be ignored. A clarification about the nature of nonlocality is perhaps appropriate here. Locality in the form of memory could explain the correlation of photon polarizations for any one choice of measurements, e.g., vertical vs. horizontal polarization. It is the freedom of the observer to measure using many different polarization axes (or even circular rather than linear polarization) that leads to the need for nonlocality.
To put it another way, if you were constructing a classical science-museum simulation of an EPR experiment (not using actual photons), you would need signal wires running from each measurement to the other to make the simulation operate as quantum mechanics does. Nature seems to have such wires, but we are not allowed to use them.
2. NONLOCALITY AND THE TRANSACTIONAL INTERPRETATION OF QUANTUM MECHANICS
Quantum mechanics (QM) was invented in the late 1920's when an embarrassing body of new experimental facts from the microscopic world couldn't be explained by the accepted physics of the period. Heisenberg, Schrõdinger, Dirac, and others used a remarkable combination of intuition and brilliance to devise clever ways of "getting the right answer" from a set of arcane mathematical procedures.
They somehow accomplished this without understanding in any basic way what their mathematics really meant. The mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics is now trusted by all physicists, its use clear and unambiguous. But even now, six decades later, its meaning remains controversial. The part of the theory that gives meaning to the mathematical formalism is called the interpretation. For quantum mechanics there are several competing interpretations, with no general consensus as to which should be used.
The orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics used (sparingly) in most physics textbooks was developed primarily by Bohr and Heisenberg and is called the Copenhagen interpretation (CI). It takes a "don't ask -- don't tell" approach to the formalism which focuses exclusively on the outcomes of physical measurements and which forbids the practitioner from asking questions about possible underlying mechanisms that produce the observed effects.
The nonlocality of the quantum mechanics formalism is a source of some difficulty for the Copenhagen interpretation. It is accommodated in the CI through Heisenberg's "knowledge interpretation" which views the quantum mechanical state vector (y) as a mathematically-encoded description of the state of observer knowledge rather than as a description of the objective state of the system observed.
For example, in 1960 Heisenberg wrote, "The act of recording, on the other hand, which leads to the reduction of the state, is not a physical, but rather, so to say, a mathematical process. With the sudden change of our knowledge also the mathematical presentation of our knowledge undergoes of course a sudden change." The knowledge interpretation's account of state vector collapse and nonlocality as changes in knowledge is internally consistent, but it is rather subjective, intellectually unappealing, and the source of much of the recent misuse of the Copenhagen interpretation (e.g., "observer-created reality").
An more objective alternative interpretation of the quantum mechanics formalism is the transactional interpretation (TI) proposed a decade go by the author. A reprint of the original paper[7,8] can be found on the web at:
http://www.npl.washington.edu/ti
The transactional interpretation, a leading alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation, uses an explicitly nonlocal transaction model to account for quantum events. This model describes any quantum event as a space-time "handshake" executed through an exchange of retarded waves (y) and advanced waves (y*) as symbolized in the quantum formalism. It is generalized from the time symmetric Lorentz-Dirac electrodynamics introduced by Dirac and on "absorber theory" as originated by Wheeler and Feynman[9,10].
Absorber theory leads to exactly the same predictions as conventional electrodynamics, but it differs from the latter in that it employs a two-way exchange, a "handshake" between advanced and retarded waves across space-time leading to the expected transport of energy and momentum.
REFERENCES
[1] Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, (1935) Physical Review 47, 777-780.
[2] John S. Bell, (1964) Physics 1, 195-200.
[3] John S. Bell, (1966) Reviews of Modern Physics 38, 447-452.
[4] Stuart J. Freedman and John F. Clauser, (1972) Physical Review Letters 28, 938-941.
[5] A. Aspect, J. Dalibard, and G. Roger, (1982) Physical Review Letters 49, 91.
[6] A. Aspect, J. Dalibard, and G. Roger, (1982) Physical Review Letters 49, 1804.
[7] John G. Cramer, (1986) Reviews of Modern Physics 58, 647-687.
[8] John G. Cramer, (1988) International Journal of Theoretical Physics 27, 227-236.
[9] J. A. Wheeler and R. P. Feynman, (1945) Reviews of Modern Physics 17, 157.
[10] J. A. Wheeler and R. P. Feynman, (1949) Reviews of Modern Physics 21, 425.
[11] P. H. Eberhard, (1977) Nuovo Cimento 38B, 75.
[12] P. H. Eberhard, (1978) Nuovo Cimento 46B, 392.
[13] Steven Weinberg, (1989) Physical Review Letters 62, 485.
[14] Joseph Polchinski, (1991) Physical Review Letters 66, 397.
There are many models of inflation,
all of which are incorrect in
PHYSICISTS THINK small: FROM QUANTUM MATERIALS DESIGN TO 'VOODOO PHYSICS,' KOOKY NANOSCIENTISTS' EXPLORE THE WILD AND WACKY tiny WEIRD WORLD WITH THE EFFECTS OF THE CASIMIR FORCE EXPLAINED IN FULL In This Issue of Harvard Magazine: January-February 2005, Features, Volume 107, #3, p. 50 >>>
Nanoscientists manipulate objects and forces at a scale one-millionth the size of the period at the end of this sentence. At that size, matter behaves differently. Light and electricity resolve into individual photons and electrons, particles pop in and out of existence, and other once-theoretical oddities of quantum mechanics are seen to be real.
Nanoscale research encompasses communications, new materials, and the study of life, as well as weird quantum phenomena and incidental things that exist in the real world, like diesel exhaust and dust and viruses. Physics, mechanical and electrical engineering, materials science, chemistry, biology, and medicine converge here. This is the realm of the lowest common denominator.
"Nano-," from a Greek word meaning "dwarf," refers to a billionth part of something. An atom is a nanometer-scale object, of course, so everything around us, in its smallest constituent parts, has nanoscale components, threatening to swamp the term and turn a promising realm of inquiry into a grab bag of science and pseudoscience. To merit the label, most scientists agree, nanoscience must involve investigative control and controlled integration of matter in which the small size leads to a significant change in physical properties.
At Harvard, scientists are delving into the secrets of this tiny world, a strange place of apparent parallel realities, of proton-powered molecular biomotors, and of zero-dimensional objects, artificial atoms with adjustable numbers of individual electrons: a place where distances are measured in nanometers — billionths of a meter — and it is possible to engineer an empty space.
THE QUANTUM DESIGNER Federico Capasso, a sprightly and enthusiastic man about five and a half feet tall, is the Wallace professor of applied physics and Hayes senior research fellow in electrical engineering. Ebullient and friendly, he has nevertheless just made a mischievous claim: "I can engineer the vacuum." A perfect vacuum, something akin to deep space, is a place from which all matter has been removed: not even one molecule remains.
Great classical physicists like Aristotle and Sir Isaac Newton defined a vacuum that way. In the macroscopic world we inhabit, vacuums are, for the intents and purposes of daily living (and even for much work in scientific laboratories), empty. But actually a vacuum is a busy place and, at the nanoscale, that has physical effects.
The current view of vacuum, Capasso explains, "is that you have continuous activity as particles or quasiparticles bubble in and out of existence. They could be photons or electrons that pop up for an infinitesimal time and then disappear. The beauty is that this activity, which is called vacuum energy, has effects that you can measure over fairly large distances, like a tenth of a micron." (A human red-blood cell is about 7 or 8 microns in diameter, but even a tenth of micron is large compared to a nanometer, which is one hundredth the size.)
"The laws of physics allow lots of stuff," continues the animated Capasso. "Lately, I have been pushing the frontier." He is attempting an experiment, which, he says in Italian-accented English, "if it works, will be fantastic." If two plates are put very close together, vacuum energy will cause an attractive force between them.
"This is very weird," he notes, because the plates themselves carry no charge of any kind. This attraction, named the CASIMIR FORCE for the late Dutch physicist who predicted it, has a classical analogy that makes it easy to understand. In the era of tall ships, navigators noticed that if two schooners traveling side by side in relatively rough seas "were sufficiently close, [they] crashed into each other mysteriously. A smart physicist," says Capasso, "writing a few years ago in the American Journal of Physics, made a connection with the Casimir effect: between the two ships, you have all the ocean waves of certain wavelengths — the ones that can fit. But outside, in the open ocean, you have all possible waves. The waves inside tend to push out, but there are fewer of them than there are waves outside, which tend to push in. The result is a net pressure inward, so the two ships attract each other, and collide."
At the nanoscale, the Casimir effect, whose existence was conclusively verified just a few years ago, works the same way, Capasso explains. "In the vacuum — now there is no real light there, but you can think of vacuum fluctuations as photons popping in and out — these photons are of certain wavelengths. Only certain wavelengths can fit between the plates, but outside them you have all wavelengths. So the net effect of quantum fluctuation, or vacuum energy, is to give an effective pressure inwards" — just like the ocean waves.
Perhaps most startling for those not familiar with the truly tiny distances that can be controlled in nanoscience is the fact that the two plates can be positioned closer to each other than the wavelengths of visible and ultraviolet light. As a matter of reference, visible light has a wavelength of between 4,000 and 8,000 angstroms, or 400 to 800 nanometers, and ultraviolet wavelengths are shorter than that. Capasso, by changing the shape of the plates (making them half-spheres, for example) or by changing the nature of the materials, can manipulate the force arising from the vacuum fluctuations, thus "engineering the vacuum."
Jeremy Munday, one of Capasso's students, and Davide Iannuzzi, one of his post-doctoral fellows, are currently at work on "a beautiful experiment" that uses an effect related to that of Casimir to enable a precise measurement of the torque generated by quantum fluctuations. This torque was predicted decades ago, but never verified experimentally. Under certain circumstances, Capasso explains, things can be engineered so that two plates of suitable materials, with a suitable intervening liquid, develop a net repulsive (rather than attractive) force between them due to quantum fluctuations.
If one plate is positioned above another, the two then settle close together at the point where the weight of the upper plate is counterbalanced by the repulsive force; the upper plate essentially floats above the lower one, in what Capasso describes as a "quantum mechanical bearing" — like a ball bearing, but frictionless — an extraordinary feat of engineering in and of itself.
But Capasso is after more than this. By making the upper and lower plates from special birefringent crystals that naturally attempt to align themselves with a polarized light source, he can actually use a light to rotate the upper plate relative to the lower one. What he wants to know, and to measure, is whether, when the light source is cut off, quantum fluctuations will rotate the plate back to its original equilibrium position.
The experiment is classic Capasso, a mixture of pure physics and engineering that could as easily lead to a fresh theoretical insight as to a new technology. But don't expect to find frictionless bearings in your local hardware store anytime soon; whether they will ever find an applied use outside the laboratory is difficult to say.
The Casimir effect, however, could play a role in future technologies. Capasso notes that microelectromechanical devices (MEMs), with moving parts, are becoming commonplace. An MEM activates the airbags in automobiles, and as these devices become smaller, perhaps one day shrinking to the scale of nanomechanical devices, the minute distances would cause them to interact via Casimir forces.
Hendrik Casimir himself, who was director of research for electronics-industry giant Philips, is famous for describing the "spiral of science and technology," in which a basic advance feeds new technology, and a new technology feeds new science. Capasso is an exemplar of the scientist who understands both. Well he should: his most famous invention, the quantum cascade laser, was enabled by a new technology that made possible, for the first time, materials engineering at the atomic scale.
THE MASTERY OF MATERIALS
Semiconductors are widely used in electronics for making chips as well as light-emitting devices, and their name comes from having properties intermediate between those of conductors, like metals, and those of insulators, like rubber, which carry no electricity.
Small as a grain of salt, semiconductor lasers send billions of bits of information per second over land and under sea along thousands of miles of optical fibers; closer to home, they read music engraved in compact discs. They are based on a simple principle: by applying a small voltage across a sandwich of two semiconductor materials, negative electric charges (the electrons) and positive ones (known as "holes" or electron vacancies) are injected into the center of the sandwich, called the active region, where they "annihilate," giving off photons.
The energy and therefore the wavelength (or color) of these light quanta is determined by a key material parameter called band gap. This is the gap between the valence band of electrons surrounding an atom (those electrons that are part of the material's elemental structure) and the conduction band of electrons that flow in the presence of voltage. For a laser to emit light, an electron has to "jump the band gap," i.e., drop down into one of the "holes" in the valence band precisely by this band-gap amount, emitting a photon of equivalent energy, which thereby determines the light's wavelength. If one wishes to have semiconductor lasers emitting vastly different wavelengths, one has no other choice but to make them out of very different materials with widely different band gaps.
In the early 1990s, while working at Bell Laboratories, Capasso realized that, using an entirely different principle, he could design a new kind of semiconductor laser that didn't rely on band gaps: the quantum cascade laser. Using an advanced materials-fabrication technique called molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), capable of precisely growing artificial man-made substances, it is possible to spray-paint materials, one atomic layer at a time, onto a flat surface in a vacuum.
The materials can be changed for each layer, making it possible to create an intricate, multilayered sandwich of substances, each with its own special properties. MBE made it possible to create crystals with alternating layers of different semiconductors. Those with higher band gaps form energy barriers or "walls" that constrain electrons present in the lower band-gap material, so that they cannot easily move across the structure.
Electrons are not circus fleas, but they are capable of other tricks besides jumping across band gaps. If the semiconductor forming the wall is sprayed in a very thin layer, just a few atoms deep, then electrons in the neighboring layers can traverse it. In classical physics, when you throw a ball against a wall, it bounces back. The ball can only only blast through if it has a higher energy than the barrier. But at the nanoscale, when the particle is sufficiently small and the wall extremely thin, it can pass through. Scientists refer to this quantum mechanical phenomenon as "tunneling," an effect that is at the heart of the quantum cascade laser (QCL).
Before Capasso's invention of the QCL in 1994, no one had "ever actually been able to say with a straight face that he or she had designed a new material," writes Ivan Amato in Stuff: The Materials the World Is Made Of, which provides an accessible and entertaining account of Capasso's achievement. In a QCL, electrons tunnel through multiple layers of materials laid down using molecular beam epitaxy.
Capasso realized that if electrically conductive layers were arranged in a series of steps, with intervening insulating layers of precisely engineered resistance, then the electrons could be induced to "tunnel" down the "staircase" — the energy slope that he would design — emitting a photon of light as they tunneled between each layer. The result is that a single electron entering a QCL will emit not one photon but 25 or more, depending on the number of layers. (In conventional semiconductor lasers, on the other hand, only one laser photon is created as the electron is injected into the active region.) Most importantly, the wavelength of the QCL light is controlled not by the band gap of a particular semiconductor material but instead by the thickness of the layers, and is therefore not limited only to the wavelengths of materials that occur in nature. Materials design of this kind, Amato writes, is "tantamount to breaking the four-minute mile, or breaking the sound barrier...."
Unlike any other light source, the emitted wavelength in a QCL can be tailored across a tremendous range covering most of the invisible spectrum known as infrared. QCLs have already found several applications and are now becoming commercially available. Hundreds of times more powerful than conventional semiconductor lasers operating at equivalent wavelengths, they can monitor atmospheric pollution or measure emissions, detecting the presence of trace gases down to a few hundred parts per billion.
Capasso's success would not have been possible, of course, without benefit of the science and technology spiral — the nanoscale engineering capability provided by molecular beam epitaxy that allows researchers to build things one atomic layer at a time.
The sandwiched layers of materials created by MBE actually trap electrons in a two-dimensional plane, which physicists describe as a kind of skating rink. An insulator acts as the floor of the rink, a conductive layer acts as the ice, and then another insulator provides a low ceiling. If you were an electron out for a Sunday afternoon skate, you would wish to stand up, to operate in three dimensions as you glided around. But in this rink the ceiling is so low that you practically have to crawl on your belly just to enter. This is what electrons are forced to do in the two-dimensional rinks made by MBE, and it drives them a little crazy — which is why they sometimes tunnel out.
Being able to confine electrons in this way — the technical term for the skating rink is a "two-dimensional electron gas" — has led to new discoveries in physics, one of them recognized with the 1998 Nobel prize.
MAKING THE CAGED BIRD SING
Creating such exotic-sounding materials is relatively straightforward, according to Robert Westervelt, Mallinckrodt professor of applied physics and of physics. Physicists have fancy tools that let them image and imprint and cut and drill tiny nanoscale structures. They can take a two-dimensional skating rink and then cut out a tiny sliver, just a wavelength wide (about 40 nanometers in this case).
The result is a wire-like, one-dimensional structure. Chop a tiny bit off the end of the wire and you get a dot, a zero-dimensional structure. Scientists refer to these as quantum dots, and they are already the subject of lots of basic research. After all, physicists have reasoned, if confining electrons to two dimensions leads to exciting new physics, might a smaller cage — one or even zero dimensions — be even better?
Westervelt is the kind of scientist who wants to understand how everything works. How do confined electrons behave? What does their movement look like? Nanoscale research is providing the answers. Scientists can see things that used to be purely theoretical. Westervelt's lab, for example, was among the first to image electrons moving in real space through a two-dimensional electron gas. His research also focuses on those quantum dots — tiny semiconductor structures that contain a finite number of free electrons.
Quantum dots are so small, in fact, that their size is what determines the number of electrons they can contain. Make them too small and they will contain none at all. They are exciting research tools because they exhibit quantum mechanical behaviors such as the quantization of electron charge and spin, much as real atoms do.
("To understand quantization of electrons in a dot," says Westervelt, "imagine people entering a subway car. They enter one at a time, and a crowded car can only hold so many before it is full.")
Unlike atoms, quantum dots can be connected to electrodes, making them easier to study. A single quantum dot with electrical leads attached can be made to behave like a transistor, switching on and off at voltage levels corresponding to the energy needed to add an additional electron to the dot. In the mid 1990s, Westervelt's group and others made an artificial molecule by bringing two quantum dots together, essentially creating a chemical bond between two artificial atoms.
Being able to connect two or more quantum dots makes it theoretically possible to build circuits, and that could in turn open up a whole new area of research in electronic and magnetic devices, such as computers. Furthermore, Westervelt's group has created quantum dots that contain just a single electron. Having one electron, because it is easy to control, has expedited research into the new field of spintronics (electronics based not on an electron's charge, as in a traditional transistor, but on its spin) and into the development of systems for quantum information processing.
Electrons have spin that is either up or down — but spin can also be both up and down simultaneously in what is called a superposition. And superpositions, it is thought, are what will someday allow the construction of quantum computers that are exponentially more powerful for solving certain kinds of problems than conventional computers. (More on this later.)
But even with respect to conventional computers, the electronics industry is "beginning to ask academic people to think about new ways of representing information," says Westervelt, who is director of a National Science Foundation-funded Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC) based at Harvard.
The NSEC is an interdisciplinary research collaboration among scientists at Harvard, MIT, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, who also work with researchers at the Sandia, Oak Ridge, and Brookhaven National Laboratories and internationally at Delft University of Technology, the University of Basel, and the University of Tokyo.
As the semiconductor industry reaches the limits of how small it can make a silicon chip, industry researchers are looking for new ways to make computers faster. A new approach might be to use the quantum states of nanostructures instead of the electron charge to represent information. "Understanding ideas like these," says Westervelt, "we can create new types of nanoscale electronics."
VOODOO PHYSICS Charles Marcus works on an entirely different timescale. "The things we explore," he says, "might be useful or might only be interesting in the abstract, or might only be useful for my great-grandchildren."
Though his research lies in a realm that appears barely poised on the edge of reality, it couldn't be more grounded: nanoscale science enables Marcus to study the physical manifestations of the strangest quantum mechanical effect of all, one that defies normal intuition and logic: a phenomenon called "entanglement."
Marcus, fortunately, is a master of simple explanations. "Before life gets weird," he says with a grin, "let's cover what we're familiar with. An electron doesn't have a lot of machinery. It has a charge: negative. It has a mass, so it weighs something. It has a position in space: it's somewhere. It has a momentum: it's going somewhere. And about those last two, there's a trade-off: if you know one precisely, then you don't know the other.
"But that isn't so otherworldly, in fact. If you want to see where something is, you've got to shine some light on it or something like that, otherwise you're in the dark and you can't see it. A little thing like an electron gets a real knock from having light shined on it," Marcus explains, "and gets speeded up by the light hitting it. The better the look you want to get — by using shorter wavelengths of light — the bigger a knock you give it. So you can't measure where it is without messing up its momentum."
Another property of electrons is that they have angular momentum, or spin. "The earth," says Marcus, "in addition to moving around the sun, is spinning on its own axis, and so it not only has momentum — it's moving through space — but it has angular momentum, and a magnetic field that's related to that spinning motion. The same for electrons: they have momentum if they are moving, but they also have angular momentum as if they are spinning, and a magnetic field around them aligned with that angular momentum.
"So far, so good. Nothing too strange yet." Now imagine you are in deep space, where there is no up or down, and the electron could be spinning in any direction at all. "Here's where it gets a little weird. When you ask an electron if it is spinning up or down, it will always give you 'Up' or 'Down' as an answer. It won't answer, 'You asked me the wrong question — I'm pointing sideways to the direction that you asked me.'"
Considered alone, this is not a terrible problem, says Marcus. But when you consider the consequences, things start to become very strange. Say you have a particle whose angular momentum is zero, which then explodes into two parts that go flying off in opposite directions with opposite spins. "Now I wait until they are a billion miles apart — an hour, a week, a century — however long I want to wait," Marcus explains.
"I'm out in deep space now, and say I have a measuring apparatus that lets me query one of the particles in the vertical direction (whatever that means in deep space). I ask it, 'Are you aligned with or against such and such a direction?' And it will say either yes or no — 'I'm aligned with' or 'I'm aligned against.' The other particle, now at the far side of the galaxy, will have to give the opposite answer: because they started together, their angular momentums must add up to zero."
But how does the particle that answers second know what question the first one will be asked? "The original inquiry could have been made at any angle: 90 degrees to the left or 45 degrees to the right. The first particle says yes; then the other would become purely, 100-percent-probability-aligned in the opposite direction," Marcus continues, "instantaneously learning what the other one had answered and therefore adjusting its value to the right value."
Einstein himself was deeply troubled by this, Marcus notes. It implies that you either have to abandon the notion that effects are local — that one thing influences another — or believe that the world is completely deterministic, that there is no such thing as free will. In that case, the query itself as well as the answer are preordained.
Either way, this is a non-intuitive situation. "And yet that's the world we live in," Marcus says. "If it doesn't make sense, that is our brain's fault. You do these experiments, and that's what happens." There doesn't seem to be any difference between the crazy predictions of quantum mechanics and the experimental reality.
"It's a bit like voodoo: someone pokes a doll over there, and somewhere else a guy is saying, 'Ouch!' OK, with quantum mechanics, the poke to the voodoo doll and the ouch are two consequences of a common cause, but still, the effect is nonlocal. The voodoo part," as Marcus puts it, "is that nothing needs to propagate from one to the other."
THE QUEST FOR THE QUANTUM COMPUTER
"Entanglement," the quantum conundrum that Marcus describes, is the key to unbreakable quantum cryptography today, and to quantum computing in the future. Quantum computers have been described by mathematical equations, and the equations stand up to experiment. "The machines are doable, we just don't know how to make them," he says. "It might take a decade or it might take a millennium to figure out how to do it."
But they could be immensely powerful. Marcus likens it to the power that was unleashed by nuclear physics. "Quantum computing appears to be a whole reality that we haven't figured out how to take advantage of yet."
One of the real-world problems that Marcus has been working on in his laboratory involves the first step toward quantum computing: controlling the entanglement of two particles. It is possible for two separate particles to become entangled, much like a single one that has been blown apart.
Marcus achieves this by exploiting a characteristic of electrons: they always seek the lowest energy state, the way a marble in a bowl will roll around until it finds the lowest point. Two identical electrons cannot occupy the same space, just as two marbles cannot share the lowest point in a bowl. But because angular momentum is part of the space where electrons live, if one is spinning up and the other is spinning down, then they can occupy the same lowest-energy position, because they are not identical, but instead like a pair of yin/yang marbles fitting together.
Researchers in the Marcus lab can therefore trap one electron spinning up and another down in a low-energy quantum dot on a chip, and then separate them to see how long they remain entangled. The important question that Marcus set out to answer is, Do the electrons maintain their entanglement after they have been sent through transistors and boxes and wires on the chip, or does the entanglement get lost?
One way to establish this is to make the low-energy quantum dot receptive to the returning electrons only if they maintain their entangled state. If, when they return, they no longer have opposite spin, they cannot occupy the same low energy space. Researchers now know that the particles remain entangled for somewhere between a nanosecond and a millisecond, but are seeking a more precise measure. The answer is important because it may limit the kinds of calculations that a quantum computer can do, or require discovering a way to prolong entangled states.
A two-particle quantum mechanical system like the entangled electrons seems very simple, like a binary logic state in a standard computer. After all, you have an up and a down particle. But in a quantum system, the sum of the logic states is up-down, down-up; and those probabilities can be added together, so up-down minus down-up is different from down-up minus up-down. It is as if every switch in a computer could be both on and off and off and on at once.
"If you have 20 particles all doing this," says Marcus, "heaven help you," because all possible combinations are present simultaneously in what is called a superposition. This is why a quantum computer would be so powerful: all possible solutions to a problem could be represented simultaneously.
"It might seem otherworldly at first," says Marcus, "but it's not. All of this stuff is here, in the lab and in our world. It's true these phenomena don't seem evident when thinking about classical physics, but it's quantum physics that describes our world — microscale and macroscale. Now, can we put it to use in new ways? Let's find out. Let's try."
BOTTOM-UP COMPUTING AND THE BIOLOGICAL INTERFACE
Charles Lieber is working to build a computer out of the tiniest of components—one that can be assembled cheaply on a lab bench using the principles of chemistry, rather than the expensive lithographic tools employed by physicists and semiconductor manufacturers. His goal is to build a standard, digital computer, ideally with integrated optical circuits. Already, his lab's research has led to new quantum mechanical devices and even biological sensors that can be used to detect disease.
Semiconductor manufacturers can already make electronic components with features smaller than most academic labs can produce because the manufacturers etch the features into silicon; yet the endgame for "Moore's Law," which posits that computing capacity will double every 18 to 24 months based on the shrinking size of transistors, is fast approaching. There is a limit to shrinkage at the nanoscale: atoms, at 0.2 nanometers across, are nature's building blocks, and they don't come any smaller.
Lieber's approach is the opposite of industry's top-down tack: he hopes to build a computer from the bottom up, starting small from the outset. He can make nanowires just three atoms across, and do it cheaply, using materials dissolved in an alcohol solution. The solution is poured into grooved channels in a polymer block to produce an array of parallel wires.
Another set of wires can be laid perpendicular to the first simply by rotating the apparatus 90 degrees. Using this method, his lab can produce transistors just 10 nanometers across. Lieber can control various properties of the wire, such as its conductivity, by altering the composition of the alcohol solution to create different "flavors" of nanowire. These can then be mixed and matched depending on the type of transistor one wants to build.
"If all we were doing was making things smaller," says Lieber, "we would already be beaten by a company. But we have made nanoscale computer components with properties that are fundamentally different from [those in] silicon-based components, and then figured out how to organize them in different ways to make computing devices, biological sensors, and optical devices."
For example, Lieber can engineer nanowires with properties similar to those created by molecular beam epitaxy. He can make lasing nanowires, tiny wires that emit laser light. Getting a nanowire to lase is a profoundly important achievement because it means that electrical signals in a computer or other ultra-tiny electrical device can be converted to light (photons) in a highly efficient way. Photons have certain advantages over electrons. Not only are they much faster, but they are less susceptible to the crosstalk, or interference, that is sometimes seen in small electrical circuits.
Lieber has forced light to bend at a 90-degree angle within a 100-nanometer device. (This is possible because, in a very small wire, the radius of the curvature is actually small, the way we are very small compared to the curvature of the earth and therefore don't perceive it.) And he has made light-based diodes, or detectors — a key element in an optical logic circuit. His group can modulate light, control its polarization, and use wires for subwavelength guiding.
They can even connect two waveguides together (imagine connecting two wires), a process that normally takes a few millimeters or hundreds of microns, in less than a wavelength of light. He can also sort information at the nanoscale ("addressing," in computer parlance) without using lithography by building bits of information into wires before he pours them. And he has made solid-state memory. "All this demonstrates that we are really getting close," says Lieber—"that making a computer [entirely from nanoscale components] is not completely a dream."
"But," he admits, "it is still challenging to connect all the components together and demonstrate that we can process information."
His is a fundamentally different approach to computing and will require new kinds of computer architecture to exploit. So Lieber has turned to biology for inspiration about how best to make such connections. Today's desktop computers operate strictly in two dimensions, performing calculations on a flat (planar) chip. Lieber has been laying the groundwork for a much more sophisticated network of connections in three-dimensional devices by engineering branched nanowires, and by studying the architecture of the brain.
"If we are always thinking about confining ourselves to a plane," he says, "I just don't see that we are going to do something revolutionary relative to what is going on in electronics today." The goal is not to understand the brain, per se, but to explore ways to connect with the rich variety and scales of organization and interconnections among cells in biology. Biological principles can be used to transmit chemical and electronic information, so it is possible to make hybrid computing devices.
"What we have done so far is cool," Lieber says, "but it is not going to change things. Combining biology with nanotechnology to create a new field of science is going to be the future."
Because his lab is a leader in the development of nanoscale biological sensing devices, creating a biological interface is not such a far-fetched idea. Lieber's group has already made sensors for detecting prostate cancer and viruses, and such devices have a bright future. They operate by taking advantage of another special property of nanoscale objects: their surface area is huge relative to their volume, making them highly sensitive to external stimuli. "Things that happen at the surface can therefore affect the whole structure," Lieber explains.
While this could cause unwanted interference in an electronic circuit, it can be exploited in biology. "Normally a molecule binding to the surface of a transistor wouldn't have a big effect. But imagine a protein with a charge on it coming up to something very small, where the surface is a big component; the protein biologically or chemically switches the transistor on or off. In essence, you can electrically detect when you have a protein, a nucleic acid, or anything else."
The technology could even be modified to detect chemical and biological agents used in warfare. His nanoscale detectors might be thought of as hard-wired, application-specific devices. They don't run software and, because they are tiny, they really don't have to. Software gives fixed hardware the flexibility to do many things. But with these sensors, Lieber says, you could in principle design a centimeter-square chip to detect a billion things simultaneously, even variations in an individual's DNA.
Once, at a conference, when Lieber raised the possibility of linking the computing power of the brain to the power of digital electronics, he was questioned about the ethics of doing such a thing. (He had shown a slide of a human brain that included a little chip.) He hadn't considered that, he replied. Although that kind of tight integration sounds radical, some people (those who carry their laptops with them all the time?) might welcome it.
Such integration is purely hypothetical today, but a partial alternative could be realized with today's nanotechnologies. Flexible electronics, which allow the fabrication of "cheap and powerful displays with the properties of billion-dollar fabrication-line silicon," says Lieber, are easy to make and of high quality. These tiny, flexible plastic screens could even go over the eye, like a contact lens. Such a device might be an ethically palatable intermediate step in the direction of a biological interface.
Robert Westervelt's research group has also been exploring the use of semiconductor technology to create new tools for bioengineering applications. Working with Donhee Ham, an assistant professor in electrical engineering at Harvard, his students have created hybrid chips by building a microfluidic system on top of a custom-designed silicon integrated circuit (IC). The microfluidic system provides a biocompatible environment for the living cells, and the IC brings the power of semiconductor electronics.
The cells have magnetic beads attached, which makes it possible to move them around on a chip and even to pull them apart. Such a system could be used to sort cancer cells from normal cells, or even to assemble artificial tissues. Donald Ingber, Folkman professor of vascular biology at Harvard Medical School, has used magnetic beads like these to explore the effects of mechanical stress on cells. (At the cellular level, breakdowns in function are often due to mechanical failures.)
Westervelt also collaborates with Kit Parker, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Harvard who has envisioned a novel application in tissue assembly. "There is a theory," Westervelt explains, "that when someone suffers a heart attack, the heart cells talk to each other. When one cell starts having a heart attack, the other cells feel it and decide to have a heart attack too, causing the whole thing to take off. But this hasn't actually been tested, because we need to get two heart cells, put them together, torch one of them and see whether the other one lights up."
By engineering such chips, which are typically just a centimeter square, Westervelt hopes to bring the power of microprocessors to bio-experimentation.
THE EXPANDING NANO FRONTIER Biology may be the area that fuels a revolution in nanoscience and technology, says Flowers University Professor George Whitesides, a chemist. Physics gave the field tools for imaging, probing, drilling, cutting, and writing; chemistry has contributed efficient approaches to materials science, an area in which Whitesides is expert; but advances so far have been evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, he says.
The study of biological nanostructures might change all that: "The cell is chock full of small structures whose function we can't replicate right now, and that's an area that is intensely interesting."
The flagellar nanomotor, which bacteria like E. coli use to get around, is a prominent example. It has a central shaft like a motor in a ship, but "is actually completely different in its methods of operation," using the flow of protons to spin a flagellum that propels the cell through fluids. "And it is smaller than any motor human beings can make," Whitesides adds.
Understanding the principles of its operation might prove useful in other nanoapplications, he suggests, or the motor might be made to serve a new purpose in a living animal. Another important area of inquiry lies in understanding how biological structures interact with nano-sized particles such as carbon nanotubes (that can be grown like hair) and buckyballs (named for R. Buckminster Fuller '17).
These are unhealthy to inhale, but government safety regulations cover such substances in laboratories, where researchers deal with hazardous materials all the time, says Whitesides. However, in the area of public health, the realization that small particles in the air are a dangerous kind of pollution that can become lodged in the lungs has led to serious concern, particularly about diesel-fuel emissions, which can cause illnesses ranging from asthma to lung cancer.
For Whitesides to be championing research in the biological realm is no surprise. The work done in his laboratory serves as a kind of bridge between the physical and the biological sciences. A polymath with wide-reaching collaborations across disciplines, he works with Capasso, for example, on fluid optics, injecting liquids into a quantum cascade laser without disrupting its ability to lase. The technique could be valuable for spectroscopically analyzing trace chemical or biological elements in fluids and also for controlling the wavelength of the light emitted by the laser.
Capasso "builds things that last forever out of semiconductor materials," says Whitesides. "We make things that are extremely evanescent entirely out of fluids" — such as liquid light channels made from flexible materials. Devices that combine these approaches might lead to fundamentally new ways to manipulate light. "Can it open a window into something else," he asks, "particularly here in biology, which is full of fluids and soft things?"
Fluids are not the only area of research in the Whitesides laboratory with direct application to biology. His group specializes in making nanostructures that "might be fairly simple, but are very cheap and easy to make, so that you don't need fancy 'e-beams' [for cutting and drilling] and elaborate 'clean rooms'" for nanoscale fabrication. "We find ways of making easily structures that the electrical engineering and condensed-matter-physics community has made with great difficulty, so that biologists and material-science chemists can get involved in this," Whitesides says. "The economics of these areas are quite different than they are in electronics" — where a semiconductor-fabrication facility might cost billions of dollars.
Whitesides' lab has come up with a method for printing and molding materials called soft lithography; it has been "particularly useful in getting small structures extended into biology, because the methods used for microelectronics are intrinsically too expensive and [made of the wrong materials]," such as hard silicon semiconductors.
"These [printing techniques] are very simple methodologies that rely on the contact of one molecule or atom with another," he says, but they allow replication of structures down to about half a nanometer, even smaller than is possible with light-based lithography.
In 1959, the prescient physicist Richard Feynman anticipated the field of nanoscale science and technology. In a lecture titled, "There's plenty of room at the bottom," he explained how it would be possible to one day write the entire contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin. That day has arrived.
But Feynman also described far more ambitious ventures, envisioning a day when one might "swallow the surgeon," which would then perform the necessary operation. Though that day has yet to come, hints of its promise are already appearing in Harvard laboratories.
Thinking small has a big future. ----------------------------------------- Jonathan Shaw is managing editor of this magazine
January-February 2005: Volume 107, Number 3, Page 50
Date:
Sun, 09 Jan 2005 11:00:00 -0330
- - Some "Spirituality" of "Rhythm Based Communication (RBC) Theory" - -
"The Concept 'CareTaker' is: 1) short for 'CareTakerGod,' 2) genderless, 3) an attempt to unify all spirituality within the living Gaia Planet." [In "Why 'Caretaker?'(proceeding)" <www.egroups.com/message/time/12280>]
Omnipotence of "Our CareTaker" may mainly involve CareTaker "RBC power." Omnipresence of Our CareTaker may mainly involve "Earth's Living Cells." Omniscience of Our CareTaker includes "CareTaker Accumulated Knowledge." To accumulate such vast knowledge Our CareTaker has mastered memory use.
Physical events MAY lie outside the realm of Rhythm Based Communication. "Long, Long Lasting Life," however, may involve a "Spirituality of RBC." A far "Shorter Life Duration" exists in known "Central Nervous Systems."
Geophysical/cosmological "Signal Based Events" are not within RBC power. "Dinosaur Termination" & such were likely caused by Signal Based Events. Dinosaur Spirits, as "long, long lasting," MAY BE in today's ecosystems. "The Spirituality of RBC" may result in lack of trauma in animal deaths.
From Title: Rhythm Based Communication (RBC) is <Encoding of Information in "Rhythm Based Time (RBT=RT)">. "RBT" is <One's Perception of Lateness Relative to "SynchronizaTion" Between 2, 3 or More Communicating Minds>.
More later to answer Dr. Atso Eerikainen's questions re "Subject Title."
This is the 9th Day of Jan, and the 1470th day of this 3rd Millennium at 11:00:00 hrs "NLT" (Ceta-Research's 7th day "alphaTime"), "Chimo," peter
The same seems to happen with consciousness, computers, AI, complexity etc. now. Why it must be adapted to those standards? To me it appears as the same old "control kink" of indirect rule if one tries to apply these standards to the "inner Africa" of the second reality (possible computer simulations included). I am by far not a purist but a "syntheticist" so to say...
Na base dessa frase nos podemos formular uma oposição entre informação e signo e perguntamos: Como vai a evolução da informação ao signo, símbolo e texto?
Na verdade consciência é um efeito local e individual mas precisa e produce um híper espaço conceitual como realidade secundária ----- prototípico
mas um híper-espaço conceitual e símbolico
„sinal localidade“, informação etc. Isto é : a vida é a declinação sucessivamente da localidade, e os degraus dessa declinação são os códigos ou as categorias de Peirce na interpretação de Edwina Taborsky.
Os seres primários
Intenção
resposta (response) ---- sentimento, topoi, localidade dos signais.
presposta (presponse) --- pressentimento, utopía, não-topoi --- alocalidade dos signos.
È não uma não-temporalidade, mas uma com trajetos mais longos. Das ermoglicht gleichzeitigkeit. Anders micro
Seres evolvem consciência do que macro quanta vacuo > Alocalidade Comunicação Alocal
Uma semiosfera é um macro quanta vacuo
“More is different”, BIT from IT (bottom-up), emergencia, IT from BIT (top-down) constitução. Mas pode um potencial constitute nos?
Intencionalidade / Intenção
„signo alocalidade“, comunicação etc.
matematica, mitematica >> massa e musa
física da consciente
2.
Wirklichkeit, Lévi-Strauss, Bystrina Na base deste fundamento lógico nos podemos aproximar ao conceito das duas realidades ou dos “dois modos indicativos” na tradiçao de Ivan Bystrina e a continuação dela:
universo >>> multiverso >>> monoglossia >>> heteroglossia
Synchronie Diachronie a materia processual, Ernst Bloch, Whitehead electrons anders in doetz, boson etc.
da schwierigkeiten zeichen zu erfassen
Signallokalitaet, Signalalokalitaet >>> um der Konfusion Herr zu werden, muss der physikalische Begriff Signal durch Zeichen ersetzt werden. Finkelstein >>> Narration, Metaexperimenter
É eu que localizo os signos… são local Com o sceleton estrutural e local da consciência. Doniger O’Flaherty: sonho, mito, skelett und fleisch der goetter, zwilling, griff, knochen und fleisch etc.
And this is the very starting point of all thinking, belief, science, sociability etc. (it is true, that I spoke here about "human mind", but the same is valid
for all other
"realizations" of mind; supposing that there is any). Thoth is so to say the mediator between the inside and the outside, the natural and the cultural etc.; an elaborated shamanic principle. That led to his byname "Lord of the three worlds" or "the three times great Hermes". He was also a relevant figure in the procedures of childbirth and death; here he acted as the "cutter", who detached the umbilical cord between the
"non-imaginary"
and the "real" and later the connection between the "real" and the
"imaginary". This is clearly a textual or pattern based operation
And I agree, that we are some kind of starseed. But we have to see the cosmos or the stars with two different perspectives (or: not with monocles but with bi-oculars), like the old alchemists did;
in the way: "the
cosmos" and "our cosmos".
Perhaps we need
more "mythematics" instead of mathematics *g*. I think we also have an evolution of dreaming, that produced quasi independent but interconnected spacetimes
“The issue for me is not which interpretation of orthodox micro-quantum theory to use, but whether micro-QM is adequate for the job of explaining mind and consciousness at all? My answer is NO! Why? Sinal locality forbids! You need "More is different" "sinal nonlocality", i.e. "presponse". Without it, you are dead in the water.” Jack Sarfatti, 08.05.2003
“It is complete mystical miracle supernatural thinking to say that our consciousness collapses the BIT field of a single electron. “We are trying to explain the emergence of consciousness in open complex material systems not in equilibrium on any level! Consciousness in the physical vacuum would be Hawking's "Mind of God"” (Sarfatti, 08.05.2003)
“Electrons A and B are not equivalent to Alice and Bob. More is different. If Alice and Bob have a discarnate collective mind via their nonlocal connection, then, within the rules of micro-quantum theory, neither of them can know telepathically what the other is thinking or feeling nor can they know what their fused mind is doing! That's sinal locality!” (ebd.)
“I am trying to understand your question. Sinal locality in orthodox QM, i.e. Wheeler's "one-way" "IT FROM BIT" implies "no cloning a quantum" at the micro-quantum level of "sub-quantal equilibrium" (Antony Valentini). I am saying that the macro-quantum theory of conscious mind will, under conditions of "sub-quantal non-equilibrium", violate sinal locality, yes. All conscious mental systems must be macro-quantum, but not all macro-quantum systems are conscious. A conscious system cannot be micro-quantum. I am also CONJECTURING, based on Bierman's data and SRI RV data, retro PK claims, that those conditions are obeyed in the open non-equilibrium sub-microtubule system (Hameroff). I am saying that "macro-quantum phase rigidity" protects against warm "decoherence".
Therefore, the answer to your question is YES! SRI RV data if true demands such a possibility. These kinds of things are very well described in Nick Herbert's book "Elemental Mind" BTW.” (ebd.)
“Micro-quantum entanglement has sinal locality. Therefore, it precludes any kind of direct communication between parts of the nonlocally connected whole. Thinking of N qubits as "nodes" nonlocally connected, or entangled to each other in a network. There is no direct communication of non-random messages among the nodes! The nonlocal influence of all the N-1 nodes on a given node is pure random quantum noise! There is no way to use qubits as a communication network for an intelligent conscious nano AI system (or even our own mind-brain system) within orthodox quantum mechanics. You must have sinal nonlocality in violation of orthodox micro-quantum theory to have conscious mind IMAO (In My Arrogant Opinion) as The Great Pundificator!” (ebd.)
Nessa contemplação todos os nivels discutidos são textuais, mas aqui a seguinte pergunta emerge: Olhando numa perspectiva evolutiva que a ideia Rupert Sheldrake's data between separated brains of animals as well as humans is called "telepathy" or RV.
It's basically "signal nonlocality"
Na perspectiva da analise structural de textos, estes textos fazem parte dos textos criativos e imaginativos. Outras espécies de textos são os textos racionais - isto é textos lógicos, matemáticos e das ciências naturais - e os textos instrumentais.
Na base dos dados da física presente nos poderiamos achar que as monades são juntados pelos processos sub-espaçial do micro quanta vacuo, mas alí não localidades, particulas são possivel.
“It fits my theory of consciousness based on "signal nonlocality" violating quantum theory in a more general post-quantum theory. Post-quantum theory is to quantum theory as General relativity (GR) is to special relativity. That is, quantum theory is the limiting case of post-quantum theory as sub-quantum thermal equilibrium is attained
as explained in papers by Antony Valentini. This is analogous to special relativity as the limiting case of general relativity as curvature vanishes.” (Sarfatti, 03.05.2004)
"To define a complex system we need to define (1) what the system depicts;
(2) what the system aims for and thus explains, (3) what the system's boundaries are, and
(4) the system's components and their dynamism."
(aren't these also the four causes: formal, final, efficient, material?) can easily define both
a mechanical and a complex system.
There is an ontological reality - where the existentiality of the entity is differentiated from
'that which it is not'. With this singular function, we have only a mechanical system.
But, if you add an epistemological function to the system; where knowledge is embedded
in its relations - then - you have a complex system. So- even an atom is complex,
for its unique instantiations function
within an internal knowledge of organization (e.g. 1 proton and 1 electron).
The knowledge
base of a machine is held by another agent - whether human or
computer.
It is a funny fact Dreamtime rainbowsnake uluru this is as funny fact the antipode to Helgoland
Bibliografia:
Bystrina, Ivan (1995) Tópicos de Semiótica da Cultura. São Paulo: CISC/PUCSP
Finkelstein
Hiley
Mindell, Arnold (2000) Quantum Mind. Portland: Lao Tse Press
Peirce, Charles Sanders; Uchtmann, Roger (ed.) (2003) Von der Klarheit unserer Gedanken. Neuenkirchen: Phänomen
Sarfatti, Jack (2002) Destiny Matrix. Bloomington, IN : 1stBooks
Sarfatti, Jack (2002) Space-Time and Beyond – Dark Energy. Bloomington, IN: 1stBooks
Sarfatti, Jack (2002-2003) Corespondencia via E-Mail comigo. R.U. cit. op.
Taborsky, Edwina (2000) Evolution des Bewusstseins. in: Uchtmann, Roger (ed.) 2003
Uchtmann, Roger (2003) Von der Klarheit der Abduktion. In: Peirce, C.S. 2003
Uchtmann, Roger (2003) Visions of the Emerald Beyond. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10, No. 8, pp. 71-78
Uchtmann, Roger (2001) Temporalidade negativa e Incomunicação – Um conceito dos valores e as suas implicações. CISC/SP
[1] In detail: Géza von Neményi „Heilige Runen“, Heyne: Munich 2003 [2] Similar and more recent developments are known from many formerly autochthon ethnicities in global perspective. [3] There are African examples that are quite similar, namely the Yoruba festivities Efe and Gelede and their South American descendents; see Uchtmann 1995ff. [4] Cf. Taborsky 2000 [5] Cf. Bystrina and Uchtmann, various publications [6] Bystrina 1995:6 [7] Marco Bischof, “Biophotons – The Light in Our Cells”, Franfurt/M.: Zweitausendeins (1995)1998 [8] Jack Sarfatti <sarfatti@pacbell.net> , Subject: Re: 7th Annual "The International Consciousness Conferences," 4-22/27-'05, Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 [9] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wave-Structure-Matter/ (Wave-Structure-Matter-owner@yahoogroups.com), 09.01.2005
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