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

The Lyrical Core of Man: Bits and Bells

From Sergio Bertolucci in yesterday's CERN press release: “Our Standard Model Higgs analysis with data collected so far leaves us in a very exciting position for 2012. With the data we collect this year, we will definitely be able to confirm or rule out a Standard Model Higgs.”

A bold statement ("definitely"!)--and indicative of how strong the December ATLAS/CMS results are. Clarifying whether the Higgs exists, and whether it's the Standard Model version, are two vastly different things, but it's still a huge endorsement for the LHC (and, hopefully, for string theory). 96% of the universe remains unexplained by the Standard Model, so results that don't point past it will be disappointing but still a coup for the collider. ATLAS won't even run at full speed until 2015, so there is a lot of good particle smashing ahead.

And speaking of the 96%, all kinds of tantalizing theories have emerged to explain it. Einstein's much-maligned "cosmological constant" theory has rebounded among some physicists, hinting at reconciliation between cosmology and quantum mechanics, and supersymmetry remains the holy grail of theorists. Plus: Craig Hogan, a physicist at the University of Chicago and director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center, has proposed that space is actually composed of discrete bits of information, not a continuous field; in other words, that the universe is digital! This might sound radical, but it dovetails nicely with what recent theories have predicted about black holes and holograms (both of which rely on the existence of digital information in space to make any sense).

[An aside: NOVA is back on PBS, and it's pretty awesome (if you can stand a few terribly animated interludes). Brian Greene, science hero to the masses, is as engaging as ever and talks through some really tricky stuff.]

But back to digital space, and information theory, which Claude Shannon developed at Bell Labs in 1948. Information theory, in tandem with the transistor, another Bell invention, completely revolutionized electronics and communications and provided a conceptual space within which brilliant thinkers from all disciplines found purchase--most recently, quantum computing, the new frontier of super-fast data computation using QM phenomena like entanglement and superposition. (Check out The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner for more on the interdisciplinary wonderland that was Bell Labs. Full discolsure: my dad worked at Bell in the late '60s!)

Ontologically, conceptualizing human existence within information theory is intimidatingly abstract: how can we reconcile our perception of reality as 1s and 0s? Do photon packets carry digital information, and can we harness or control it? How does this trouble the disctinction between human and nonhuman? And my favorite question: can information theory explain our relationship to consciousness? I could think about this all day.

Death, too, is complicated when the corporeal is deemphasized. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault writes that, once death is understood as one of many manifestations of life, “death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.” If the brain is just a highly sensitive piece of receiving technology interpreting billions and billions of bits--themselves reverberations of subatomic loops--and converting them into emotion and intellect, the "invisible truth" reveals itself: what we think of as spiritual life is transient and unaffected by the death of bodies. The lyrical core of man is an eternity of vibrating strings.

World Science Festival!

Greene, Susskind, 't Hooft, oh my! Scientists from all over the world convene in New York this weekend, talking about all kinds of scintillating stuff: the mathematical universe, parallel universes, music and spontaneity, and (my favorite) the holographic principle. Plus the festival Street Fair in Washington Square Park on Sunday, which is free and open to the public.

I'm reading The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos to prepare. See you there!

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...

Next Stop: Thoughtland

Two books inspired the creation of this blog: Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott and Tertium Organum by P.D. Ouspensky. Neither author is a physicist; both were published long before today's theories about strings and gluons predicted additional dimensions; yet both discuss the natural geometric conclusion that our perception of space and time should be broadened to include phenomena that we can't, as yet, conceptualize. Case in point: modern string theory predicts that our universe exists in ten spacetime dimensions (as opposed to our familiar four). It takes great imagination and flexibility of doctrine to imagine-- Abbott termed this scientific (or philosophical) suspension of disbelief a trip to "Thoughtland."

I'm no scientist (certainly no mathematician) but it seems to me that, more than a century after Abbott satirized the societal censorship of deep thought, we've come hardly closer to the deification of science. The most important and sought-after theory of physics--a model that would unite quantum mechanics and Einstein's general theory of relativity (also called the Theory of Everything (TOE))--is today on the precipice of discovery. (That is, if the Large Hadron Collider at CERN can overcome its myriad operation difficulties.) String Theory is finally getting its due, and its disciples dominate today's physics landscape. The fallout of discovering the Higgs boson, or the graviton, or superpartner particles, is nothing short of a deeper understanding of the makeup of the universe and ourselves.

This blog is intended to provide a library of titles for the self-educated modern philosopher-scientist. Every time creationism gains traction in a public school system or stem cell research loses its federal funding, immerse yourself in Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe or Lisa Randall's Warped Passages and be reassured: the revolution has already begun.