Quantum life: The weirdness inside us

Ever felt a little incoherent? Or maybe you've been in two minds about something, or even in a bit of delicate state. Well, here's your excuse: perhaps you are in thrall to the strange rules of quantum mechanics.

We tend to think that the interaction between quantum physics and biology stops with Schrödinger's cat. Not that Erwin Schrödinger intended his unfortunate feline - suspended thanks to quantum rules in a simultaneous state of being both dead and alive - to be anything more than a metaphor. Indeed, when he wrote his 1944 book What is Life?, he speculated that living organisms would do everything they could to block out the fuzziness of quantum physics.

One is that it is simply a wonder of evolution. Scholes thinks that proteins around algae's light-harvesting equipment might have evolved structures that shield disturbances from the environment and so allow processes within to exploit the magic of quantum physics to give them a selective advantage. Vedral thinks something similar, although why and how nature would do this, he says, is "completely unclear".

Turin shrugs his shoulders, too. "Life's 4 billion years of nanoscale R&D will have engineered many miracles," he says.

Quite.

Just completed reading David Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion. Highly recommended.

I've long suspected quantum effects will end up at the heart of many complicated life processes, rattling the orthodoxy of those who practice the Science faith and making its self-styled Moderns look as primitive as physicians of the early 14th century.

Fact is, they haven't a clue, though their questioning their underlying beliefs is the last thing they seem prepared to do.

Thanks for the post!

I'm afraid I can't give you a link for that, because it's my own observation about what Penrose actually shows with the argument he give in The Emperor's New Mind. Basically his argument goes, Goedel proved Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem, and gave a proof which proves it for any formal system of a sort later shown to be equivalent to a universal Turing machine. Thus, were Goedel (or more generally human reasoning capacity) equivalent to a universal Turing machine, Goedel would have proved his own "Goedel statement", which is absurd. Thus Goedel (and human reasoning capability) is not equivalent to a universal Turing machine (and indeed is superior to a universal Turing machine).

The flaw in the argument, if one is not a mathematical Platonist (esp. if one is a constructivist, which is the position all the harsh critics of Penrose who want to believe strong AI argue from) is that Goedel can't constructively identify his own Goedel statement, even though his construction applied in a universal quantifier over all systems equivalent to a universal Turing machine includes as an instance the construction of his own Goedel statement, and thus has not actually proved it (constructively). (And, the believer in strong AI adds, and can't because he's a Turing machine.) A mathematical Platonist is obliged to accept the proof running through the universal quantifier since it applied to the "form" of a universal Turing machine, thus giving the contradiction to strong AI Penrose asserts.

I've discussed the matter with constructivists and philosophers as well as classical mathematicians, and they agreed with my take on what Penrose actually showed by his argument. (Which matters a little bit, since it's a philosophical, rather than a mathematical argument.)

The Pauli exclusion principle is the quantum mechanical principle that no two identical fermions (particles with half-integer spin) may occupy the same quantum state simultaneously.

The St. Pauli exclusion principle is the qualitative principle that no two fermented beverages may occupy the same space unless they are both St. Pauli Girl....

Thanks!So the Pauli exclusion principle - did I learn this in college and forget it instantly or what,lol - So the negative Pauli hangs out alone while the Boson likes all sorts of neutral or positive company.

I think we broke the St.Pauli exclusion right off the bat as he had a large can of Fosters but he did continue to buy me St. Pauli Girls that evening.

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