A Quantum of Consciousness

If New York is any indicator, science has officially captured the layman's imagination. In the past couple of months, I've been to probably a dozen lectures or readings about the Higgs boson, quantum mechanics, or neuroscience, and all of them have been sold out. Rooms just completely packed with people hanging on every word from Brian Greene's mouth (his keynote at the World Science Festival last weekend was stellar), or enraptured by Matt Strassler's suggestion that music theory can inform quantum physics (it can). I showed up to a talk by the physicist David Hogg that had at least a hundred people who were turned away--including me, who foolishly assumed that I could show up ten minutes prior and still get a seat. The "hard" sciences are experiencing a cultural renaissance, partly thanks to these men (and women) who are willing to engage the public, and perhaps more importantly, to do it online: for anyone with the interest and the time, the Internet hosts a spectrum of informative and engaging non- or semi-technical resources that can be trusted. My facebook feed is cluttered with news about neutrinos and links to simulcasted events from Europe. Influential and prolific bloggers like Sean Carroll and Marcelo Gleiser not only write about their own research and fields, but actively refute other stuff they read that is inaccurate or misleading, an invaluable resource for a humanist with no physics background. Neil deGrasse Tyson blogs about Manhattanhenge and tonight's Venus transit with no agenda but to inspire non-scientists to see the world with the wonder and enthusiasm it deserves.


It's a good time to love science, is what I'm saying.


Take, for example, my favorite of the recent lectures: Paul Davies, Thorsten Ritz, and Seth Lloyd on quantum biology. Three physicists whose work has recently shifted toward this totally new field, new enough that it may only provisionally exist, though they were pretty excited about it. (And hilarious, too; I laughed all through Hockenberry's moderation.) It's a new spin on a unifying theory: quantum mechanics can explain life? Apparently, yes: quantum mechanical actions like entanglement and tunneling may elucidate some semi-understood concepts like bird migration patterns and photosynthesis. Davies said he couldn't be sure if the little evidence that has emerged so far reveals isolated instances where QM plays a role or--more tantalizing--whether these instances are "peaks of a quantum mechanical structure," if life's very distinctiveness is in essence quantum mechanical. This concept needs some unpacking, but I'm not sure I can think of anything more exciting. I'm already formulating half-baked extensions of this theory, especially as it includes consciousness (the last frontier for quantum mechanics, I suspect): what if a quantum of consciousness--a conscino, let's say--means the difference between living and nonliving? Further still, if all matter exists because of quantum mechanics (which is pretty well accepted), this may suggest that our entrenched definitions of "living" and "nonliving" need to be reworked, since anything has the potential to be endowed with quantum conscience. Much like how pre-Copernican scholars believed the earth was the center of the galaxy, maybe the paradigm shift we'll see in our lifetimes will completely re-orient how we locate our minds amid all that surrounds us. It's not a new theory--for aeons, shamans and other "outliers" have incorporated ideas of connectivity and immateriality--but if proposed by the esoteric circles that dictate our operating truths, its profundity will be redefined. And I'll be at my laptop, live-blogging it, because our web of computers is already evidence of the evolving definition of "thinking."


For fun:  Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics by Paul Davies
Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos by Seth Lloyd

Spotted: The Neutrino Chameleon

A bit of exciting news coming from Italy's OPERA experiment at the INFN's San Grasso Laboratory: for the first time ever, researchers have directly observed a muon-neutrino changing into a tau-neutrino! This is significant because, since the 1960s, physicists have predicted such an oscillation must be the cause of an apparent deficit in muon-neutrinos arriving to earth from the sun. Rolf Heuer says "This is an important step for neutrino physics...we're all looking forward to the new physics this result presages."

This discovery could also have significant impact on string theory research--or, at least, it bolsters the notion that the Standard Model is incomplete by effectively proving that neutrinos have mass (which is required in order to oscillate; the current Standard Model theory holds that neutrinos have no mass). Should scientists uncover the math behind this inconsistency by observing one or many of the "missing" neutrinos at CERN, many of the most profound questions about mass may be resolved, including the tantalizing mystery surrounding dark matter.

Speaking of that elusive stuff (which accounts for about 25% of the universe), this month CERN is releasing the brilliant ATLAS pop-up book in the United States, which colorfully examines what the universe is made of, where it came from, and how it works. It's a wonderful, intricately drawn introduction to the exciting things happening in theoretical physics right now, but also, it's just awesome!

And finally, today marks the start of the 2010 World Science Festival in New York. You'd be remiss not to check out the LIGO telescope at the Broad Street Ballroom, The Search for Life in the Universe at Galapagos Art Space, or The Moth storytellers at Webster Hall. And that's just a tiny sampling of the glut of science events hitting the city--it's a great time to be curious.

World Science Festival 2009

This weekend wraps up the World Science Festival in New York, and there are still many great events lined up, featuring lots of familiar names: festival co-founder Brian Greene, Sean Carroll, Frank Wilczek, Andy Borowitz, Leon Lederman, Bobby McFerrin, and Oliver Sacks.

I especially recommend:

Friday:
Picturing Earth: The Story of Life in Images
Da Vinci Detective
Matter: Stories of Atoms and Eyes
Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus

Saturday:
Avian Einsteins
Infinite Worlds
Time Since Einstein
Time: The Familiar Stranger

Sunday:
World Science Festival Street Fair @ Washington Square Park
Author's Corner

See you there...