tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-98572192024-03-18T22:34:31.363-05:00Quanta & ConsciousnessTo the visitor, welcome!
This blog is a kind of companion to my web site on Quanta & Consciousness, citing newsworthy events and my thoughts on these matters.
Questions or suggestions welcome.
Brian J Flanaganbjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.comBlogger56125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-12613665335145526442017-08-28T12:11:00.001-05:002017-08-28T12:18:26.388-05:00Welcome to the Revolution<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: source serif pro, serif;"><span style="font-size: 21px;">I have a big dog in this fight, so all standard disclaimers apply. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "source serif pro", serif; font-size: 21px;">This is exciting news. The paper was just now published by <i>Physical Review Letters, </i>which is, of course, a flagship among physics journals. Here's an excerpt from the article in <i>Gizmodo.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: source serif pro, serif;"><span style="font-size: 21px;">"Most physicists believe that there is a richer and deeper theory of nature beyond quantum theory."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: source serif pro, serif;"><span style="font-size: 21px;">Quantum mechanics is the theory explaining the behavior of the smallest units of nature, like photons and electrons. Particles behave like waves (and vice versa), and before observing them, scientists can only explain the particles’ properties using probabilities. Rather than saying “this ball is blue,” they can only say “here are the chances this ball is blue or green.” But when two of these balls interact, they can become entangled, meaning you must describe both the balls’ properties at the same time. Measuring one of the balls’ colors directly implies what the color of the other ball will be, no matter how far away the balls are.</span></span></div>
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Scientists can observe entanglement. <a href="http://gizmodo.com/experiment-with-chinese-satellite-demonstrates-quantum-1796143430#_ga=2.7451316.727695371.1502671157-1562309274.1482534783" rel="nofollow noopener" style="border: 0px; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank">Chinese scientists</a> set up this special inter-particle connection between light particles on a ground station and a satellite 100 kilometers away, for example. They observed correlations between the light particles in space and on Earth that couldn’t exist based on the laws of classical physics alone. Einstein<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/science/quantum-theory-experiment-said-to-prove-spooky-interactions.html?mcubz=1" rel="nofollow noopener" style="border: 0px; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank"> hated entanglement</a> since it implies that somehow, photons are influencing each other instantly without actually being near each other.</div>
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Richens’ team’s <a href="https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.080503" rel="nofollow noopener" style="border: 0px; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank">new paper,</a> published yesterday in <em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, "Source Serif Pro", serif; font-size: 0.975em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Physical Review Letters</em>, doesn’t observe entanglement. Instead, “the main contribution of this work is to provide a compelling argument that entanglement—one of the most interesting and counterintuitive aspects of quantum theory—is an inescapable feature of any physical theory more “fundamental” than classical physics,”</div>
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bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-72779671411769726132017-08-17T08:52:00.000-05:002017-08-17T08:52:12.943-05:00A New Era of Color Science<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The secret behind feather iridescence lies in how tiny structures interfere with light. These structures are fine enough to produce color through the warping of light rather than pigmentation.</div>
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Understanding how color works at a structural level could be useful for the development of sensors in medical and security applications.</div>
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With all of this in mind, we can expect the world to become a lot more colorful in the next few years.</div>
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"We are on the threshold of a new era of color science, and the interdisciplinary nature of this collaborative enterprise holds enormous promise," the authors conclude.</div>
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The research is published in <i>Science.</i></div>
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bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-35132084559211857652017-08-17T08:46:00.000-05:002017-08-17T08:47:41.103-05:00Physicists measure complementary properties using quantum clones<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The old textbooks might make handy paperweights...</div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #4e4e4e; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">(Phys.org)—In quantum mechanics, it's impossible to precisely and simultaneously measure the complementary properties (such as the position and momentum) of a quantum state. </span>Now in a new study, physicists have cloned quantum states and demonstrated that, because the clones are entangled, it's possible to precisely and simultaneously measure the complementary properties of the clones. These measurements, in turn, reveal the state of the input quantum system.</div>
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More information: G. S. Thekkadath, R. Y. Saaltink, L. Giner, and J. S. Lundeen. "Determining Complementary Properties with Quantum Clones." Physical Review Letters. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.050405, Also at arXiv:1701.04095 [quant-ph]</div>
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bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-75683870765413051152017-02-20T09:27:00.003-06:002017-02-20T09:27:24.848-06:00Primal<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Many of the foundations of wave mechanics are based on the analyses and equations that Rayleigh derived for the theory of acoustics in his book <em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, "Source Serif Pro", serif; font-size: 0.975em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Theory of Sound. </em>Erwin Schrödinger, a pioneer in quantum mechanics, studied this book and was familiar with the perturbation methods it describes. </div>
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~Masters</div>
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Excited again — found a number of articles by Atiyah, du Sautoy et al., which begin to tie together for me various threads regarding harmonics and sound.</div>
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For mathematical physicists, this material will be old news — but for the fact that they've missed the connection to what we actually hear, owing to sound's putative status as a "<a href="http://wordassociation1.net/history1.html" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #8c68cb; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank">mental</a>" thing. The scare quotes are there because "mental" is one of those words we all understand until we start to think about it.</div>
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Riemann discovered that the physics of music was the key to unlocking the secrets of the primes. He discovered a mysterious harmonic structure that would explain how Gauss's prime number dice actually landed when Nature chose the primes.</div>
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What Riemann discovered was that Gauss's graph is like the fundamental note played by an instrument, but that there are special harmonic waves that, when added to this graph, gradually change it into the true graph or "sound" of the primes, just as the harmonics of the clarinet change the sine wave into the square wave.</div>
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~du Sautoy</div>
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"Mathematics in the 20th Century," by Sir Michael <a href="http://web.math.rochester.edu/people/faculty/cmlr/Advice-Files/Atiyah-Mathematics.pdf" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #8c68cb; cursor: pointer; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank">Atiyah</a></div>
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bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-1349613258066003702017-01-09T12:14:00.001-06:002017-01-09T12:27:30.284-06:00Perfect Harmony<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "source" serif "pro" , serif;">'Harmonics,' by Cory Ench</span></div>
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When starting down a new path, I like to find the simplest book I can find on the subject at hand.</div>
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The eminent mathematician Edward Frenkel has provided a great service here in regard to the 'Langlands <a href="http://www.msri.org/web/msri/scientific/workshops/other-workshops/frenkel-langlands" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #8c68cb; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank">program</a>,' which has been aptly described as the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) of mathematics.</div>
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I was quite excited to learn of a good number of intersections between that vast and lively body of work* and my own, including symmetry, projective geometry, spectral theory, Riemannian surfaces, quantum field theory (QFT), and harmonic analysis.</div>
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Although symmetry is arguably the most important theme here, <em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, "Source Serif Pro", serif; font-size: 0.975em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">gauge</em> symmetries are fairly abstract, whereas harmonic analysis provides a trove of correlations between simple physical theory and what we directly experience in sight and sound.</div>
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Let's review.</div>
<div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961); font-family: "Source Serif Pro", serif; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 32px; margin-bottom: 3.2rem; margin-top: 3.2rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, "Source Serif Pro", serif; font-size: 0.975em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The mathematician Fourier proved that any continuous function could be produced as an infinite sum of sine and cosine waves. His result has far-reaching implications for the reproduction and synthesis of sound. A pure sine wave can be converted into sound by a loudspeaker and will be perceived to be a steady, pure tone of a single pitch. The sounds from orchestral instruments usually consists of a fundamental and a complement of harmonics, which can be considered to be a superposition of sine waves of a fundamental frequency f and integer multiples of that frequency.</em></div>
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<em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, "Source Serif Pro", serif; font-size: 0.975em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The process of decomposing a musical instrument sound or any other periodic function into its constituent sine or cosine waves is called Fourier analysis. You can characterize the sound wave in terms of the amplitudes of the constituent sine waves which make it up. This set of numbers tells you the harmonic content of the sound and is sometimes referred to as the harmonic spectrum of the sound. The harmonic content is the most important determiner of the quality or timbre of a sustained musical note.</em></div>
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<a href="http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Audio/fourier.html" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #8c68cb; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank">Hyperphysics</a></div>
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OK, now here's Frenkel.</div>
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<em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, "Source Serif Pro", serif; font-size: 0.975em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The roots of harmonic analysis are in the study of harmonics, which are the basic sound waves whose frequencies are multiples of each other. The idea is that a general sound wave is a superposition of harmonics, the way a symphony is a superposition of the harmonics corresponding to the notes played by various instruments. Mathematically, this means expressing a given function as a superposition of the functions describing harmonics, such as the familiar functions sine and cosine. Automorphic functions are more sophisticated versions of these familiar harmonics. There are powerful analytic methods for doing calculations with these automorphic functions. And Langlands' surprising insight was that we can use these functions to learn about much more difficult questions in number theory.</em></div>
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/books/review/love-and-math-by-edward-frenkel.html" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #8c68cb; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank">Frenkel</a></div>
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Well, this is just a taste, but that's enough for today.</div>
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* The Langlands program has deep roots in number theory, but I've only scratched the surface of that sprawling topic. For the time being, here's a nice <a href="http://www.claymath.org/library/cw/arthur/pdf/57.pdf" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #8c68cb; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank">bridge</a> in regard to theory vis-à-vis experience.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "source" serif "pro" , serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 21px;"><i>It was not until the advent of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century that absorbtion spectra were given a satisfactory theoretical explanation. They were shown to correspond with eigenvalues of appropriate Schrödinger operators. A given atom could absorb or emit light only at certain frequencies, corresponding to the energy levels of bound states represented by different eigenvalues. The mathematical spectra of differential operators thus carried fundamental information about the physical world, which even now seems almost magical.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 0.975em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><i>The analogy with number theory is through spectra of other differential operators. These are Laplace-Beltrami operators (and variants of higher degree) attached to certain Riemannian manifolds. The spectra of these and other operators are expected to carry fundamental information about the arithmetic world, a possibility that also seems quite magical.</i></span></div>
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~Arthur</div>
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bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-77917299565848266282016-10-11T09:21:00.000-05:002016-10-11T09:21:16.698-05:00Message in a Bottle<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4kl2PRkM-KkcRuAo5SgvFuXFtQMg4OBDyg2yjR6H3VKWMqL5fIGw-8hmXin_FnR4c6_TqWAjjjDBj33qHrwa6fOjIUnMwwuQ81-emfU8ieyCYIOSpvFeSZCB7PLEybUA37flWEg/s1600/msg-in-bottle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4kl2PRkM-KkcRuAo5SgvFuXFtQMg4OBDyg2yjR6H3VKWMqL5fIGw-8hmXin_FnR4c6_TqWAjjjDBj33qHrwa6fOjIUnMwwuQ81-emfU8ieyCYIOSpvFeSZCB7PLEybUA37flWEg/s400/msg-in-bottle.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I recently received an email from what sounded like a very bright young person, talking about machine consciousness, qualia, and <i>essentia.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Then that email rather mysteriously disappeared. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">So this is a 'message in a bottle,' whereby I hope to reach that individual and ask that they try again.<br /><br /><a href="mailto:bjflanagan@fieldfx.biz">bjflanagan@fieldfx.biz</a></span></div>
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bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-81629186166953559862016-10-01T12:02:00.000-05:002016-10-01T12:02:08.636-05:00The Forces of Nature, Color<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<iframe width="320" height="266" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5mqImbusHGY/0.jpg" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5mqImbusHGY?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
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Watched this on PBS the other night.<br />
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There's nothing here you likely haven't known for a long time.<br />
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Except for the fact that they state, quite explicitly, that color is a feature of light itself.<br />
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Did our civilization just do a 180 on the subject?<br />
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And did no one bother to tell me?<br />
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Oooh, that makes me so mad.</div>
bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-43389184288997443742016-05-19T08:22:00.000-05:002016-05-27T07:37:45.899-05:00New Support for Alternative Quantum View<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd6HBeO85ma3EtcU53lg2XstD6-HXI2sjkY2SYL6425rXbMda4ECfATMLpyi9bD16nV-qge84byR3zFzp4TcPiW5fSH2Ixa9ok_6kRcojEkrWRpdzYUJapb7SkUAZEryqrzpvckQ/s1600/water-drop-iStock.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd6HBeO85ma3EtcU53lg2XstD6-HXI2sjkY2SYL6425rXbMda4ECfATMLpyi9bD16nV-qge84byR3zFzp4TcPiW5fSH2Ixa9ok_6kRcojEkrWRpdzYUJapb7SkUAZEryqrzpvckQ/s320/water-drop-iStock.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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By <span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/authors/dan-falk/" style="background-image: none; background-position: 0px 95%; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 100% 1px; border: 0px; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; text-shadow: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Dan Falk</a></span></div>
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May 16, 2016</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16.08px;">Of the many counterintuitive features of quantum mechanics, perhaps the most challenging to our notions of common sense is that particles do not have locations until they are observed. This is exactly what the standard view of quantum mechanics, often called the Copenhagen interpretation, asks us to believe. Instead of the clear-cut positions and movements of Newtonian physics, we have a cloud of p</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16.08px;">robabilities described by a mathematical structure known as a wave function. The wave function, meanwhile, evolves over time, its evolution governed by precise rules codified in something called the Schrödinger equation. The mathematics are clear enough; the actual whereabouts of particles, less so. Until a particle is observed, an act that causes the wave function to “collapse,” we can say nothing about its location. Albert Einstein, among others, objected to this idea. As his biographer Abraham Pais wrote: “We often discussed his notions on objective reality. I recall that during one walk Einstein suddenly stopped, turned to me and asked whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I look at it.”<br /><br />But there’s another view — one that’s been around for almost a century — in which particles really do have precise positions at all times. This alternative view, known as pilot-wave theory or Bohmian mechanics, never became as popular as the Copenhagen view, in part because Bohmian mechanics implies that the world must be strange in other ways. In particular, a 1992 study claimed to crystalize certain bizarre consequences of Bohmian mechanics and in doing so deal it a fatal conceptual blow. The authors of that paper concluded that a particle following the laws of Bohmian mechanics would end up taking a trajectory that was so unphysical — even by the warped standards of quantum theory — that they described it as “surreal.”<br /><br />Nearly a quarter-century later, a group of scientists has carried out an experiment in a Toronto laboratory that aims to test this idea. And if their results, first reported earlier this year, hold up to scrutiny, the Bohmian view of quantum mechanics — less fuzzy but in some ways more strange than the traditional view — may be poised for a comeback.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg21prmzK0SwMfrLm_V-7bOvSZc8zldVJtIPzSewkPcTt-3faC6c7Z2wP0u6QS0oTz5VOWb8sdtkzbNTK7waTeMVWlumX3d68ECbq1hv6cj5Omi198deQv0OqNDg-HHS3DDJbRkxA/s1600/fxlogo_medium_nu.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg21prmzK0SwMfrLm_V-7bOvSZc8zldVJtIPzSewkPcTt-3faC6c7Z2wP0u6QS0oTz5VOWb8sdtkzbNTK7waTeMVWlumX3d68ECbq1hv6cj5Omi198deQv0OqNDg-HHS3DDJbRkxA/s1600/fxlogo_medium_nu.jpg" /></a></div>
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16.08px;"><br /><br />Disclosure: I've long argued for a similar <a href="http://www.fieldfx.biz/#!about/c10fk">POV</a>.<br /></span></div>
bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-28473337925427842942016-01-10T14:09:00.002-06:002016-01-16T07:57:15.559-06:00Notes on the Revolution, 5<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #232629; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 32px;">Here's a stunner: Nobelist Frank Wilczek, talking about the same stuff I've been on about for 40 years, regarding <a href="http://wordassociation1.net/spectra1.html">color</a> v. <a href="http://wordassociation1.net/action.html">action</a>, <a href="http://wordassociation1.net/symmetry.html">symmetry</a>, and higher <a href="http://wordassociation1.net/manifold.html">dimensions</a>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #232629; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 32px;">(The first 20 minutes or so are a recap of contemporary physics.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">More on <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/notes-revolution-5-brian-j-flanagan?published=u">LinkedIn</a></span><br />
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bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-66882918417253487402016-01-03T09:11:00.001-06:002016-01-03T09:11:40.383-06:00Notes on the Revolution, 4<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br />Quantum Computers</span><div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br />Emerging Technology That Will Revolutionize The World<br /><br /><br />By <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/author/david-deuchar">David Deuchar</a></span><div>
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<span style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.298039); background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216) 50%); background-position: 0px 29.5px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 3px; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large; letter-spacing: -0.022em; line-height: 1.22; text-decoration: none;"><a class="markup--anchor markup--h4-anchor" data-href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/3757256-quantum-computers-the-emerging-technology-that-will-revolutionize-the-world" href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/3757256-quantum-computers-the-emerging-technology-that-will-revolutionize-the-world" rel="nofollow" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.298039); background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216) 50%); background-position: 0px 29.5px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 3px; letter-spacing: -0.022em; line-height: 1.22; text-decoration: none;">Summary</a></span></div>
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<li><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Google’s Quantum AI team, which works with NASA and D-Wave Systems, recently announced concrete evidence of huge runtime gains for proof-of-principle optimization problems with D-Wave’s latest quantum computer.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The 1000+ qubit D-Wave 2X quantum annealer outperforms classical processors by a factor of over 10 to the 8, or 100 million times.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Central banks, governments and major aerospace firms already employ the technology on a exploratory basis, but financial researchers/directors see massive potential for portfolio optimization in the vein of HFT trading.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">This technology not only has massive implications for Google but for the entire financial industry as a whole.</span></span></li>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); letter-spacing: -0.063px; line-height: 33.18px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The ability to solve complex, dynamic problems that would take classical computers tens of thousands of years in mere seconds — this has been the promise of quantum computing. The theories and ideas behind quantum computing have been around for decades, but now, Google is starting to demonstrate concrete progress in the quest for a practical quantum annealer that could revolutionize the entire world.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); letter-spacing: -0.063px; line-height: 33.18px;">I was happy to see </span><em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); letter-spacing: -0.063px; line-height: 33.18px;">color</em><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); letter-spacing: -0.063px; line-height: 33.18px;"> and </span><em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); letter-spacing: -0.063px; line-height: 33.18px;">consciousness</em><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); letter-spacing: -0.063px; line-height: 33.18px;"> in the scrolling topics. Here’s a little learning to flesh that out a bit.</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdmiGWOOQYLwjvcnuuCLrZmR72bKIjzpHDV2Bwe_wFELiNfDHeFnREOMyVEZ2mKFDpP-oQ-jwLehLxbZjv6TYJdStt6g3GpQuB3E3XkvdmIHQnov5MM6vgV6AQ65greCS9epdVmA/s1600/russell1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdmiGWOOQYLwjvcnuuCLrZmR72bKIjzpHDV2Bwe_wFELiNfDHeFnREOMyVEZ2mKFDpP-oQ-jwLehLxbZjv6TYJdStt6g3GpQuB3E3XkvdmIHQnov5MM6vgV6AQ65greCS9epdVmA/s1600/russell1.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>S</i><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; letter-spacing: -0.392px; line-height: 46.0444px;">o long as we adhere to the</span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; letter-spacing: -0.392px; line-height: 46.0444px;"> conventional notions of mind and matter, we are condemned to a view of perception which is miraculous. We suppose that a physical process starts from a visible object, travels to the eye, there changes into another physical process, causes yet another physical process in the optic nerve, and finally produces some effect in the brain, simultaneously with which we see the object from which the process started, the seeing being something “mental”, totally different from the physical processes which precede and accompany it. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic; letter-spacing: -0.392px; line-height: 46.0444px;">This view is so queer that metaphysicians have invented all sorts of theories designed to substitute something less incredible.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; letter-spacing: -0.392px; line-height: 46.0444px;">~Bertrand Russell</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMN1010SMjOfz5_JjcbqRL0nW1voCdE7EoRONVQXn2LnnV38W-JwOg0fGpJiSsbHavMXkoOhhYo2Aa6D7amELee788FJBD2UYwxkMp0vFPpeJQd4HgN1dDr5uuoEpgYRCnkm_3-Q/s1600/schrodinger2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMN1010SMjOfz5_JjcbqRL0nW1voCdE7EoRONVQXn2LnnV38W-JwOg0fGpJiSsbHavMXkoOhhYo2Aa6D7amELee788FJBD2UYwxkMp0vFPpeJQd4HgN1dDr5uuoEpgYRCnkm_3-Q/s1600/schrodinger2.jpg" /></a><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6); font-style: italic; letter-spacing: -0.392px; line-height: 46.0444px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">If you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow light, he will tell you that it is transversal electromagnetic waves of wavelength in the neighborhood of 590 millimicrons. If you ask him: But where does yellow come in? he will say: In my picture not at all, but these kinds of vibrations, when they hit the retina of a healthy eye, give the person whose eye it is the sensation of yellow.</span></span></div>
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bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-43784228805473518342015-10-05T12:24:00.000-05:002015-10-05T12:24:22.446-05:00Quantum Effects in Biology<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq7vDDXj66RJGxO2LWfAHgZ_KXU9S2Y5mckjwSl8UwS7PQSLvFN1-md2R-arc4H6IMuC-Zd5tZrWwAJO7SrjU8GlHXdiHpnQ3cKOKbrckpxSLqfV5ThSbzS0ybYyjtwp2ZTjJhiw/s1600/q_bio.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq7vDDXj66RJGxO2LWfAHgZ_KXU9S2Y5mckjwSl8UwS7PQSLvFN1-md2R-arc4H6IMuC-Zd5tZrWwAJO7SrjU8GlHXdiHpnQ3cKOKbrckpxSLqfV5ThSbzS0ybYyjtwp2ZTjJhiw/s1600/q_bio.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; line-height: 15.456px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Quantum Effects in Biology</i></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 15.456px;">The first scientific book on Quantum Effects in Biology has just been released by Cambridge University Press. One of the Google Quantum AI Lab researchers, Masoud Mohseni, is the lead editor. Quantum biology is a fascinating subject of both fundamental and practical relevance to quantum engineering and quantum information science, since at its core it describes the conditions under which coherent phenomena could exist and have a functional role in noisy and complex quantum sy</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; display: inline; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 15.456px;">stems. Here is a brief description of the book:</span><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; line-height: 15.456px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Quantum mechanics provides the most accurate microscopic description of the world around us, yet the interface between quantum mechanics and biology is only now being explored. This book uses a combination of experiment and theory to examine areas of biology believed to be strongly influenced by manifestly quantum phenomena. The book covers diverse subjects including coherent energy transfer in photosynthetic light harvesting, environment-assisted quantum transport, spin coherence in the avian compass, and the problem of molecular recognition in olfaction. Data, fundamental theory, experimental approaches, and the underlying design principles are described in detail for each topic as are possible directions for future research. The book is ideal for advanced undergraduate and <span style="line-height: 15.456px;">graduate students in physics, chemistry, and biology seeking to understand the interface of quantum mechanics, quantum information, and complex biological systems.</span></span></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; line-height: 15.456px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 15.456px;"></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The book is written by an internationally recognized team of scientists who are among the pioneers in this emerging field, and includes a foreword by Nobel Laureate,Tony Leggett. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For more detailed please see the following link:</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/physics/biological-physics-and-soft-matter-physics/quantum-effects-biology">Quantum Effects in Biology</a> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Edited by M. Mohseni, Y. Omar, G. Engel, and M. Plenio</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Cambridge University Press, 2014</span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 15.456px;">Well, this is great news, owing to the prestige of Cambridge U and its Press. It seems clear enough that this publication will prove to be a watershed in the history of the field. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 15.456px;">Speaking of...</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 15.456px;">Let's examine the following blurb from the material quoted above:</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 15.456px;"><i>This book uses a combination of experiment and theory to examine areas of biology believed to be strongly influenced by manifestly quantum phenomena.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 15.456px;">Now let's recall a comment made by Freeman Dyson* in his classic <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Field-theory-Scientific-American-offprint/dp/B0007G2M1M">article</a> on "Field Theory" in <i>SciAm:</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 15.456px;"><i>There is nothing else except these [quantum] fields: the whole of the material universe is built of them.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 15.456px;">Biological systems, including the brain, are part of the material world. It therefore follows that they just are collections of quantum fields.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 15.456px;">Paraphrasing the first quoted comment above yields an assertion re: <i>'[quantum fields] believed to be strongly influenced by manifestly quantum phenomena.'</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 15.456px;">Which would seem plausible. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 15.456px;">What's required here is a change of gestalt </span></span><span style="color: #3e3e3e; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.6px;">— </span><span style="color: #141823; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 15.456px;">a paradigm shift in Kuhn's original (and much-abused) sense, found in his seminal <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo13179781.html">work</a> on <i>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 15.456px;">* This is an essential point, stated explicitly in other places, as e.g. in the <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/US/academic/subjects/physics/cosmology-relativity-and-gravitation/large-scale-structure-space-time">book</a> by Hawking and Ellis on <i>The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 15.456px;">The view of physics that is most generally accepted at the moment is that one can divide the discussion of the universe into two parts. First, there is the question of the local laws satisfied by the various physical fields. These are usually expressed in the form of differential equations.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 15.456px;">(The second has to do with boundary conditions.)</span></span></div>
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bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-59537784907814823612015-06-17T13:54:00.002-05:002015-06-17T13:54:56.153-05:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><a href="http://www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/frameset.php?pageid=http%3A//www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/press/160615.php">Artificial Intelligence & Quantum Computing: Utopia or Dystopia?</a></b></div>
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At the recent highly secretive Bilderberg summit held in Telfs-Buchen, Austria, one of the key subjects on the agenda was Artificial Intelligence. The key question is why are some of the most powerful global leaders in government, military, banking, media, intelligence, business, academia, and more, focussing on Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and humanoid robots? What are the consequences for humanity, our society and government policy? Will this technology revolutionise the world we live in between 2015 and 2030, and beyond? Or will it be declared as the most serious threat to the survival of the human race and ought to be heavily regulated?<br /></div>
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<b>Spawning Quantum Artificial Intelligence?</b></div>
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For the first time, clear blue water is being established between Quantum Computing (QC) and Classical Computing (CC), as QC pole vaults in performance within the domain of machine learning, a vital discipline within Artificial Intelligence. Make no mistake, this may be the beginning of the realisation of parts of the holy grail and open the way to a thousand and one mission critical applications for computers and humanoid robots that have proved illusive for decades. Machines may finally be able to do what we do, in some cases better than us and with higher levels of safety and security!</div>
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bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-38641196007087675082014-12-14T10:14:00.001-06:002014-12-14T10:14:41.974-06:00What Artificial Intelligence Is Not<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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First of all, AI is nothing to be frightened of. It’s not a sentient being like SkyNet or an evil red light bulb like HAL. Fundamentally, AI is nothing more than a computer program smart enough to accomplish tasks that typically require human quality analysis. That’s it, not a mechanized, omnipresent war machine.</div>
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Secondly, AIs are not alive. While AIs are capable of performing tasks otherwise performed by human beings, they are not “alive” like we are. They have no genuine creativity, emotions or desires other than what we program into them or they detect from the environment. Unlike in science fiction (emphasis on the fiction) AIs would have no desire to mate, replicate or have a small AI family.</div>
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Next, AIs are generally not very ambitious. It’s true that in very limited context, an AI can think similarly to us and set tasks for itself. But its general purpose and reason for existence is ultimately defined by us at inception. Like any program or technology, we define what its role in our society will be. Rest assured, they will have no intention to enslave humanity and rule us as our AI overlord.</div>
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<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/13/what-artificial-intelligence-is-not/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=Netvibes">What AI Is Not</a></div>
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Thanks to Rob Smith (@robpecabu) for a welcome infusion of reality-based thinking.<br /><br />As to AI and sentience, though... It seems to me that the door is very much open. </div>
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Merriam-Webster tells us that <i>sentient</i> means "<span style="background-color: #e8ecf5; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.6000003814697px; line-height: 20px;">able to feel, see, hear, smell, or taste."</span></div>
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My own work bears directly on what might be called <i>artificial sentience. </i><br /><br />Since this blog is all about all that, though, I will refrain from repeating myself this one time.</div>
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bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-10989396799722813812014-11-17T09:11:00.000-06:002014-11-17T09:11:00.921-06:00Jason Lanier on the Myth of AI<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Views from <a href="http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai">The Edge</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lanier is always thoughtful and often provocative in a constructive way. I happen to agree with him, here:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The usual sequence of thoughts you have here is something like: "so-and-so," who's a well-respected expert, is concerned that the machines will become smart, they'll take over, they'll destroy us, something terrible will happen. They're an existential threat, whatever scary language there is. My feeling about that is it's a kind of a non-optimal, silly way of expressing anxiety about where technology is going. The particular thing about it that isn't optimal is the way it talks about an end of human agency.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But it's a call for increased human agency, so in that sense maybe it's functional, but I want to go little deeper in it by proposing that the biggest threat of AI is probably the one that's due to AI not actually existing, to the idea being a fraud, or at least such a poorly constructed idea that it's phony. In other words, what I'm proposing is that if AI was a real thing, then it probably would be less of a threat to us than it is as a fake thing. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">What do I mean by AI being a fake thing? That it adds a layer of religious thinking to what otherwise should be a technical field. Now, if we talk about the particular technical challenges that AI researchers might be interested in, we end up with something that sounds a little duller and makes a lot more sense.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For instance, we can talk about pattern classification. Can you get programs that recognize faces, that sort of thing? And that's a field where I've been active. I was the chief scientist of the company Google bought that got them into that particular game some time ago. And I love that stuff. It's a wonderful field, and it's been wonderfully useful.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But when you add to it this religious narrative that's a version of the Frankenstein myth, where you say well, but these things are all leading to a creation of life, and this life will be superior to us and will be dangerous ... when you do all of that, you create a series of negative consequences that undermine engineering practice, and also undermine scientific method, and also undermine the economy.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The problem I see isn't so much with the particular techniques, which I find fascinating and useful, and am very positive about, and should be explored more and developed, but the mythology around them which is destructive. I'm going to go through a couple of layers of how the mythology does harm. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The most obvious one, which everyone in any related field can understand, is that it creates this ripple every few years of what have sometimes been called AI winters, where there's all this overpromising that AIs will be about to do this or that. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px; line-height: 14.5600004196167px;">In the near future, you might be surprised to visit to the giant hardware store in your town and find yourself greeted by a chatty robot rather than a human sales assistant. A harbinger of this age of robotic shopping is being trialled with two Oshbot robot sales assistants at an Orchard Supply Hardware store in San Jose, California. Built by Lowe’s Innovation Labs and Silicon Valley technology company Fellow Robots using "science fiction prototyping," the OSHbots are designed to not only identify and locate merchandise, but to speak to customers in their own languages.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px; line-height: 14.5600004196167px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px; line-height: 14.5600004196167px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px; line-height: 14.5600004196167px;">The personal touch makes visits to cavernous megastores less intimidating – especially when you’re a novice in the world or U-bends and junction boxes. But human sales assistant cost money, which can often be more effectively spent by concentrating human talents on more complex tasks than hunting down a self-tapping drywall screw. To allow this while still keeping customers happy, Orchard Supply, a subsidiary of Lowe’s, is seeing how well robots can take up the slack.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px; line-height: 14.5600004196167px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px; line-height: 14.5600004196167px;" /></div>
bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-36574646355258944102014-09-06T11:42:00.001-05:002014-09-06T11:44:59.912-05:00Automata<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">"If we go back to the city, we will die."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">"To die, you have to be alive first.You're just a machine."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">"Just a machine? That's like saying you're just an ape."</span></div>
bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-78748214485023414722014-08-15T08:24:00.002-05:002014-08-31T13:15:17.997-05:00The Robots of Dawn<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The narrator makes a number of compelling points, but the analogy to horses is lame.<br />
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Horses don't vote, stage mass demonstrations, discomfit robber barons or sabotage factories.<br />
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On a larger note, economic determinism of whatever kind is fundamentally flawed in that people are assumed to behave like so many cogs in a social machine.<br />
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But inanimate objects do not reflect on their situations, nor do they seek to change them.<br />
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We need to consider what sort of civilization we want.<br /><br />We must never become slaves to the machine.</div>
bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-26992466500344163452014-06-17T18:43:00.001-05:002014-06-17T18:43:28.269-05:00Field FX @ 1 Million Cups<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I presented a multimedia extravaganza to an audience of techies and business people recently, courtesy of the good people at <a href="https://www.facebook.com/1MCICR">1 Million Cups</a>. </div>
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People told me it went well, despite me being rusty and an initial glitch. There were excellent questions and some good laughs.<br /><br />The video is hosted at <a href="http://new.livestream.com/accounts/7106736/events/3082582/videos/53554118">livestream</a>. If you're interested, I suggest you fast-forward past the first 8 minutes or so, when the show really gets under way.</div>
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The brainchild of the <a href="http://www.kauffman.org/">Kauffman Foundation</a> in Kansas City, 1MC is all about entrepreneurship. Groups meet every two weeks to hear people pitch their startups for 6 minutes. The rest of the hour consists of a Q&A session. </div>
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Our meetings are highly informative and lots of fun. So it's no surprise that there are now <a href="http://www.1millioncups.com/">branches</a> all over the US.</div>
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bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-41344564636096051282014-05-24T08:17:00.001-05:002014-05-24T08:17:40.287-05:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://app.emaze.com/334007/field-fx#slidenum=1"><b>Field FX</b></a></span></div>
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I'm taking my multimedia presentation on the road! It's all about AI, robotics, neural nets and quantum theory.</div>
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A business friend told me that the talk was all about robots at this year's SXSW conference. </div>
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<i>Physics in Mind: The Quantum Brain</i> was recently named book-of-the year by <i>Physics World.</i></div>
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And I have been approached by a major university publisher. So the time seems right.</div>
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The presentation is geared for a college-educated audience, with ample time for Q&A.</div>
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If interested, please contact me for details: bjflanagan[at]fieldfx.biz</div>
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bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-4145397491052615262014-04-29T08:06:00.002-05:002014-04-29T08:06:29.148-05:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://stanford.io/1tZkat4">A circuit board modeled on the human brain</a></span></h4>
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For all their sophistication, computers pale in comparison to the brain. The modest cortex of the mouse, for instance, operates 9,000 times faster than a personal computer simulation of its functions.</div>
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Not only is the PC slower, it takes 40,000 times more power to run, writes Kwabena Boahen, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford, in an article for the Proceedings of the IEEE.</div>
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"From a pure energy perspective, the brain is hard to match," says Boahen, whose article surveys how "neuromorphic" researchers in the United States and Europe are using silicon and software to build electronic systems that mimic neurons and synapses.</div>
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bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-42171915220553601192013-12-29T08:56:00.004-06:002013-12-29T09:04:01.343-06:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<nyt_headline type=" " version="1.0"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/science/brainlike-computers-learning-from-experience.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0"><span style="font-size: large;">Brainlike Computers</span></a></nyt_headline></h1>
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<span style="line-height: 52.79513931274414px;">by John Markoff </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 52.79513931274414px;">NYT, 12/28/13</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.467em;">The first commercial version of the new kind of computer chip is scheduled to be released in 2014. Not only can it automate tasks that now require painstaking programming — for example, moving a robot’s arm smoothly and efficiently — but it can also sidestep and even tolerate errors, potentially making the term “computer crash” obsolete.</span></div>
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The new computing approach, already in use by some large technology companies, is based on the biological nervous system, specifically on how neurons react to stimuli and connect with other neurons to interpret information. It allows computers to absorb new information while carrying out a task, and adjust what they do based on the changing signals.</div>
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bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-90437976993078083452013-12-20T07:31:00.003-06:002014-03-19T13:35:44.310-05:00Physics World's 2013 Book of the Year<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/dec/17/biophysics-rollercoaster-ride-wins-physics-worlds-2013-book-of-the-year"><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Physics in Mind: a Quantum View of the Brain</span></b></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">by Werner Loewenstein</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">When <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Physics World</i> published a list of the five biggest unanswered questions in physics earlier this year in its <a href="http://physicsworld.com/cws/download/oct2013" style="color: #ab0000; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">25th anniversary special issue</a>, "What is consciousness?" was not on it. The reason for its exclusion seemed, at the time, straightforward: although the nature of consciousness is one of the toughest conundrums of modern science, it is not one that is commonly associated with physics. Biology and neuroscience, yes. Philosophy, certainly. Perhaps even art or poetry. But not, for the most part, physics.</span></div>
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<a class="thickbox" href="http://images.iop.org/objects/phw/news/17/12/12/2013-winner.jpg" style="color: #ab0000; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title="The 2013 Book of the Year is <i>Physics in Mind</i> by Werner Loewenstein"><img alt="Cover of the book "Physics in Mind"" src="http://images.iop.org/objects/phw/news/thumb/17/12/12/2013-winner.jpg" style="border: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" title="Cover of the book "Physics in Mind"" /></a><br />
<a class="thickbox" href="http://images.iop.org/objects/phw/news/17/12/12/2013-winner.jpg" style="color: #ab0000; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title="The 2013 Book of the Year is <i>Physics in Mind</i> by Werner Loewenstein">Physics and biology entangled</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In his book <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Physics in Mind: a Quantum View of the Brain</i>, author Werner Loewenstein sets out to convince readers otherwise, and thereby "sink into oblivion" the idea that "biology is biology, and physics is physics, and never the twain shall meet". The result is, in the <a href="http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/2013/may/16/consciousness-from-the-ground-up" style="color: #ab0000; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">words of our reviewer Seth Lloyd</a> "an intellectual rollercoaster ride" that takes in ideas about the nature of time, evolution, electrochemical signalling, information theory and, ultimately, quantum computing – a burgeoning field that Loewenstein believes may hold vital clues to the problem of consciousness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">So there it is. We cannot leave out the bewildering quantum world from our naturalistic accounts of higher brain processes. lest we risk missing the mark. And as we grope our way through the web of the brain for clues to the mechanisms of consciousness, we must keep a weather eye out for quantum phenomena, even if they are strange, as quantum phenomena inevitably are.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Loewenstein, p.238 </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And here we are. This is a good read, offering many fascinating nuggets of information and insight. In my own efforts, I have largely focused on finding a physically plausible account of mind & brain, and so I am especially grateful for all the material from physiology and biophysics, whereof the author was a professor at Columbia. I now have many new points of departure for further thought and research, thanks to Loewenstein's lively book, and for that I thank him. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">That said...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I have a few serious reservations concerning a number of his remarks, but will concentrate on several crucial points, and that briefly, so as not to be a complete ingrate. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Let us revisit Freeman <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Field-theory-Scientific-American-offprint/dp/B0007G2M1M">Dyson</a> for a moment: "<span style="text-align: center;">There is nothing else except these [quantum] fields</span><span style="text-align: center;">: </span></span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: center;">the whole of the material universe is built of them."</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So to those who question the relevance of quantum theory to the brain (and at the risk of being snarky), I'm inclined to ask what it is about "nothing" that they don't understand? Let's move on.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">But before anything else, we must define what we mean by a </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">c<i>olor.</i> Though it is one of our most common </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">perceptions, color is not something easily explained. Try to </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">define, or even describe, a color, and you discover how </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">quickly you run into a tautology. One naturally looks to </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">physics in this case.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">As was already known to Aristotle, every theory must begin with a list of undefined elements in order to avoid an infinite regression of definition. The question arises naturally: What if colors are among nature's elements? Though somewhat jarring, this move would seem to handle this difficulty at one stroke. We might then ask, in a parallel with Riemann, what sort of space-time geometry might arise from including colors as its elements. We get a pointer here from the master himself, in his famous lecture on the foundations of geometry.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">[So] few and far between are the occasions for forming notions whose specializations make up a continuous manifold, that the only simple notions whose specializations form a multiply extended manifold are the positions of perceived objects and colors.</span></blockquote>
<a href="http://larouchepac.com/node/12479">Riemann</a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Loewenstein then goes on to paraphrase one of <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=hP9-WIEyv8cC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Schrodinger+what+is+life&hl=en&sa=X&ei=SI8LU-iaIqnOyQGq4oDoBA&ved=0CDsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Schrodinger%20what%20is%20life&f=false">Schrodinger</a>'s remarks on color.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">If you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow light, he will tell you that it is transversal electromagnetic waves </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">of wavelength in the neighborhood of 590 millimicrons. If </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">you ask him: But where does yellow come in? he will say: In </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">my picture not at all, but these kinds of vibrations, when </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">they hit the retina of a healthy eye, give the person whose </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">eye it is the sensation of yellow.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Lowenstein then asserts that "</span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">There is no physics reason why two spots, one lit by a </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">single wavelength and the other by a mixture, should look </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">exactly alike. No physics theory will predict that."</span><br />
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<a href="http://wordassociation1.net/colorvctr.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://wordassociation1.net/colorvctr.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Well, no lesser a luminary than Hermann <a href="http://wordassociation1.net/spectra1.html">Weyl</a> tells us that colors behave like vectors, as do photons. Colors might then be supposed to add like vectors, and so they do. The analogy is reliable and exact, allowing us to manufacture TV screens where the vast majority of the colors we see are <i>metamers</i> or mixtures of RGB. Don't take my word for it.</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">[When] a state is formed by the superposition of two other </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">states, it will have properties that are in some vague way </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">intermediate between those of the original states and that </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">approach more or less closely to those of either of them </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">according to the greater or less 'weight' attached to this </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">state in the superposition process. The new state is </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">completely defined by the two original states when their </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">relative weights in the superposition process are known, </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">together with a certain phase difference, the exact meaning </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">of weights and phases being provided in the general case by </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">the mathematical theory. </span></blockquote>
<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=XehUpGiM6FIC&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13&dq=dirac+%22superposition+process+are+known%22&source=bl&ots=VMA5nVwtoF&sig=2Xv928EVpVSQPSkMpfn2QHusPxQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=4ZELU9zeMKiiyAG2voGgBw&ved=0CE0Q6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=dirac%20%22superposition%20process%20are%20known%22&f=false" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Dirac</a><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Finally, we read: "</span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The physicist is right, of course; color is not a thing of </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">the world outside but of the one inside us."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The physicists are wrong, of course</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">—</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">most of them. <a href="http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/mach.htm">Mach</a> was exceptional: </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">A color is a physical object a soon as we consider its </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">temperatures, and so forth. </span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">When we consider, however, its </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">dependence upon the retina [...], it is </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">a psychological object, a sensation. Not the subject matter, </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">but the direction of our investigation, is different in the </span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">two domains.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And so with <a href="http://www.informationphilosopher.com/presentations/Milan/papers/Dual-aspect-Atmanspacher.pdf">Pauli </a>(PDF):</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">For the invisible reality, of which we have small pieces of </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">evidence in both quantum physics and the psychology of the </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">unconscious, a symbolic psychophysical unitary language must </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">ultimately be adequate, and this is the far goal which I </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">actually aspire. I am quite confident that the final </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">objective is the same, independent of whether one starts </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">from the <i>psyche</i> (ideas) or from <i>physis</i> (matter). Therefore, </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I consider the old distinction between materialism and </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">idealism as obsolete.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; line-height: 12.896000862121582px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/The_interpretation_of_quantum_mechanics.html?id=RrbvAAAAMAAJ">Schrödinger</a> also demurred on this issue; see the "Third Lecture: The Part of the Human Mind," in </span></span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">his</span> <i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Interpretation of quantum mechanics.</span></i><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
What this <i>something</i> is cannot be said; by calling it matter or field or whatnot, we just give it a name. The relevant point is that it is not supposed to have any other properties but geometrical configuration, changing in time according to certain "laws of nature." It is not in itself yellow or green, sweet or cold. If parts of it appear to us so, there is no hard, indubitable fact to make this judgment true or false.</blockquote>
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This view is strongly supported by our analysis of actual experimental procedure, and it is attractively simple. It carries us comfortably a long way, indeed so long, that we may have forgotten its artificiality, when we meet the obstacles that it renders unsurmountable. So it is better to ask the naive but very pertinent question right away: how do red and yellow, sweet and hot come in at all? Once we have removed them from our "objective reality," we are at a desperate loss to restore them. We cannot remove them entirely, because they are <i>there,</i> we cannot argue them away. So we have to give them a living space, and we invent a new realm for them, the mind, saying that this is where they are, and forgetting the earlier part of the story—all that we have been talking about till now—is also in the mind and nowhere else. But deeming it to be something else—objective reality—we run against the unanswerable question: how does matter act on mind, to produce in it the sensory qualities—and also how does mind act on matter, to move it at will? These questions cannot, so I believe, be answered in this form, and they owe their embarrassing form precisely to our having posited an objective reality which is a pure geometrical scheme of thought and deprived of everything real given by experience.</blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In his article in </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Scientific American,</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><a href="http://consc.net/papers/puzzle.html" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Chalmers</a><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> has provided a modern take on this position. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">How do we restore "</span>red and yellow, sweet and hot"?<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> What might Pauli's "</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">psychophysical unitary language" look like? Somewhat surprisingly, we already an answer in Heisenberg's matrix formulation of quantum theory. Happily, our answer is thoroughly grounded in daily observation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><i>Similar light produces, under like conditions, a like sensation of color.</i> ~Helmholtz</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We can both broaden and tighten this remark with a little help from </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Heisenberg and say that the same state vector, acted upon by the same (matrix) operator(s), produces the same spectrum of colors</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">—</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">as well as the other secondary properties. <a href="http://www.feynmanlectures.info/docroot/III_20.html">Feynman</a> helps us out with an easy lesson:</span><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-weight: normal;">If you take a physical state and do something to it</span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">—</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">like rotating it, or like waiting for some time</span></span> </span><small><small><img alt="delta" src="http://wordassociation1.net/delta.gif" style="height: 13px; width: 14px;" title="delta" /></small></small><span style="color: black; font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic;">t</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">—</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span><span style="font-weight: normal;">you get a different state. We say, "performing an operation on a state produces a new state." We can express the same idea by an equation:</span></span></blockquote>
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|<sub><img alt="phi" src="http://wordassociation1.net/phi.gif" style="height: 17px; width: 10px;" title="phi" /></sub>> = <span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-weight: bold;">A</span>|<sub><img alt="psi" src="http://wordassociation1.net/psi_symbol.gif" style="height: 17px; width: 12px;" title="psi" /></sub>>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">An operation on a state produces another state. The operator A stands for some particular operation. When this operation is performed on any </span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">state, say</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> |</span></span><sub><span style="color: black;"><img alt="psi" src="http://wordassociation1.net/psi_symbol.gif" style="height: 17px; width: 12px;" title="psi" /></span></sub><span style="color: black;">>, <span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">it produces some other state</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">|</span></span><sub><span style="color: black;"><img alt="phi" src="http://wordassociation1.net/phi.gif" style="height: 17px; width: 10px;" title="phi" /></span></sub><span style="color: black;">><span style="font-weight: bold;">.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The new state </span><img alt="phi" src="http://wordassociation1.net/phi.gif" style="font-size: 13px; height: 17px; text-align: center; width: 10px;" title="phi" /> <span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">has a perfectly predictable spectrum</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">—</span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">and this is a key point because, as the mathematician <a href="http://www.stolaf.edu/people/steen/Papers/73spectral.pdf">Steen</a> (PDF) reminds us, "The mathematical machinery of quantum mechanics became that of spectral analysis...," which is just the matheematics of matrices and vectors.*</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Now, in a way, we have only restated myriad observations in a slightly formal language. Thus, we get up in the morning and things look, sound, taste and feel the way they generally do. Where there are differences, we find physical causes for those differences. Thanks to Heisenberg, however, we can say all this without leaving his formulation of quantum theory. Isn't that interesting? From a physical standpoint, it is naturally immaterial whether the operator fields in question are inside or outside the brain, thus mooting the supposedly "subjective" character of sensory data.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It is well worth noting that we typically model neural nets via the same math. Perhaps this is just because neural processes are mediated by operator fields</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">—</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">acting upon sensory state vectors?</span><br />
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Returning to the bit about how "color is not a thing of the world outside but of the one inside us," this begs an epochal question, what <a href="http://wordassociation1.net/Says_who_gh.html#Hume">Hume</a></span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> and Leibniz already understood as the central problem of materialist thinking.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Besides, it must be confessed that Perception and its </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">consequences are inexplicable by mechanical causes; that is </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">to say, by figures and motions. If we imagine a machine so </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">constructed as to produce thought, sensation, perception, we </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">may conceive it magnified— to such an extent that one might </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">enter it like a mill. This being supposed, we should find in </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">it on inspection only pieces which impel each other, but </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">nothing which can explain a perception. It is in the simple </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">substance, therefore,—not in the compound, or in the </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">machinery,—that we must look for that phenomenon [...]</span></blockquote>
<a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Monadology_(Leibniz,_tr._Hedge)"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Leibniz</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Well, of course, materialism carried the day</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">—</span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">because it worked! Up until the moment when we try to frame a science of perception. We are then met with an incomplete description of reality. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Enter <a href="http://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.47.777">EPR</a>:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In attempting to judge the success of a physical theory, we may ask ourselves two questions: (1) “Is the theory correct?” and (2) “Is the description given by the theory complete?” It is only in the case in which positive answers may be given to both of these questions, that the concepts of the theory may be said to be satisfactory. The correctness of the theory is judged by the degree of agreement between the conclusions of the theory and human experience...</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Whatever the meaning assigned to the term complete, the following requirement for a complete theory seems to be a necessary one: every element of the physical reality must have a counterpart in the physical theory.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Where are we? As we know from Maxwell, Weyl, Schrodinger and Feynman, colors behave like vectors. Which are dual to differential forms. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This is interesting, since what we perceive are colored areas</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">—</span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">and in light of those dualities which unite the different flavors of string theory into M-theory. </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Moreover, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=vImIJE0kQNcC&q=projective+geometry#v=snippet&q=projective%20geometry&f=false">Weyl</a> tells us that colors respect a projective vector geometry and these dualities have their provenance in projective geometry. The immediate upshot being this: Every true theorem we can state about colors and vectors implies another true theorem about colors and forms. More general implications might be glimpsed in a pregnant remark by Wittgenstein:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">A speck in the visual field, though it need not be red must </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">have some color; it is, so to speak, surrounded by color-</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of the sense of </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">touch some degree of hardness, and so on.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Dirac mentioned just now that <i>phase</i> enters the picture when discussing superposition. This is also suggestive, given that lights (and sounds) of different phases reliably produce interference phenomena resulting in different colors (and sounds). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Curiously, <i>phase</i> is just what <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9810524">gauge</a> theory is all about. In gauge theory (which would more accurately be called <i>phase theory</i>), we have an interesting parallel with M-theory's extra dimensions</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">—viz., </span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Geometry-Yang-Mills-Publications-Normale-Superiore/dp/8876423036/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1393516690&sr=1-1&keywords=Geometry+of+Yang-Mills+Fields">internal</a> spaces</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">—</span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">where important physical symmetries hold sway. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Now, it is of the greatest importance to note that the secondary properties respect these symmetries, as a moment's reflection will disclose. Thus, an astronaut in a closed spaceship cannot say, judging from the appearances of the secondary properties, whether he is in uniform motion or at rest, or whether he is accelerating or in a gravitational field.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; text-align: left;">A speck in the visual field, though it need not be red must </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: left;">have </span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: left;">some color; </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: left;">it is, so to speak, surrounded by color-</span></i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: left;"><i>space.</i> ~Wittgenstein</span></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a><span id="goog_538754886"></span><span id="goog_538754887"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://global.oup.com/academic/product/philosophical-foundations-of-quantum-field-theory-9780198242895;jsessionid=E352B95C68C47FDB7A100D481848DF55?cc=us&lang=en&">Cao</a> ties a number of these considerations together for us.</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Now let us turn to the central topic, the geometrization of fundamental physics. The starting-point here is the geometrization of gravity: making Poincaré symmetry local removes the flatness of space-time and requires the introduction of some geometrical structures of space-time, such as metric, affine connection, and curvature, which are correlated with gravity. </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The internal space defined at each space-time point is called a fiber, and the union of this internal space with space-time is called fiber-bundle space. Then we find that the local gauge symmetries remove the 'flatness' of the fiber-bundle space since we assume that the internal space directions of a physical system at different space-times points are different.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">So the local gauge symmetry also requires the introduction of gauge potentials, which are responsible for the gauge interactions, to connect internal directions at different space-time points. We also find that the role the gauge potentials play in fiber-bundle space in gauge theory is exactly same as the role the affine connection plays in curved space-time in general relativity.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Identifying antipodal points on the projective sphere, but assigning them a </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">180-degree phase difference, recovers the fact that colors a + (-a) = 0, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">where "0" means "no light" or "darkness," thus completing the vector space, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">the other axioms of closure, etc. being obviously met.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Notice that assigning colors (and the other secondary properties) to the "hidden" variables and/or extra dimensions one of the chief objections to these theories, viz., if such extra dimensions or variables exist, why do we not "see" them? The answer being that we do observe them, everywhere, all the time</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">—</span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">but they have been veiled from our sight by ancient dogma, but also for reasons found in <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=vbhlJUfx9MwC&pg=PA29&lpg=PA29&dq=Wittgenstein+tractatus+%22simplicity+and+familiarity%22&source=bl&ots=ng6GiBXyyP&sig=5ZBDGdjMC1sbfBBB1zsFSS5sNhg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dpsLU6TZJKSRygGNv4HwDQ&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Wittgenstein%20tractatus%20%22simplicity%20and%20familiarity%22&f=false">Wittgenstein</a>: "The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden(!) because of their simplicity and familiarity."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In closing, I'd like to mention how pleased I am to see that these various points are percolating throughout the academic world, inasmuch as these notions were once beyond the lunatic fringe</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">—or, as I like to say, my personal comfort zone.</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Now, as promised, I have kept my remarks brief and so skipped over many important issues in the foregoing, but again, I've been at this for a long time and </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">so if the reader is desirous of further instruction, she is directed </span><a href="http://wordassociation1.net/qcindex.htm" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">here</a><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">.</span><br />
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* In Göttingen in 1925-26 Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger created the theory of quantum mechanics. In Heisenberg's theory the physical fact that certain atomic observations cannot be made simultaneously was interpreted mathematically to mean that the operations which represented these operations were not commutative. Since the algebra of matrices is non-commutative, Heisenberg together with Max Born and Pascual Jordan represented each physical quantity by an appropriate (finite or infinite) matrix, called a transformation; the set of possible values of the physical quantity was the spectrum of the transformation. (So the spectrum of the energy of the atom was precisely the spectrum of the atom.)<br />
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Schrödinger, in contrast, advanced a less unorthodox theory based on his partial differential wave equation. Following some initial surprise that Schrödinger's "wave mechanics" and Heisenberg's "matrix mechanics"—two theories with substantially different hypotheses—should yield the same results, Schrödinger unified the two approaches by showing, in effect, that the eigenvalues (or more generally, the spectrum) of the differential operator in Schrödinger's wave equation determine the corresponding Heisenberg matrix. Similar results were obtained simultaneously by the British physicist Paul A. M. Dirac. Thus interest in spectral theory once again became quite intense.<br />
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<a href="http://www.stolaf.edu/people/steen/Papers/73spectral.pdf">Steen</a>, "Highlights in the History of Spectral Theory," <i>American Mathematical Monthly</i> 80 (1973) 359-381.<br />
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bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-89044624469023838212013-12-03T09:41:00.002-06:002013-12-03T09:41:51.555-06:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://bit.ly/18Ah1bN">Carver Mead on Quantum Computing and Neuromorphic Design</a></h1>
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In the 1980s, Mead grew frustrated with the limits of traditional CPU design, and turned to mammalian brains for inspiration. Three decades hence, this field of neuromorphic computing is back in the spotlight with efforts like the Human Brain Project. Mead, now 79, maintains a professor emeritus position at Caltech, where he taught for over forty years. In a recent interview with MIT Technology Review, Mead details why it’s important for computer engineers to explore new forms of computing.</div>
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Mead is also directing his energy into developing a unified framework to explain both electromagnetic and quantum systems. This is summarized in his book Collective Electrodynamics. Mead is skeptical, yet supportive, of current quantum computing projects.</div>
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bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-13004882468859518202013-10-25T09:34:00.001-05:002013-10-27T17:10:46.869-05:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16.363636016845703px;">Last May, in partnership with NASA, we announced the Quantum A.I. Lab, a place where researchers from around the world can experiment with the incredible powers and possibilities of quantum computing.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16.363636016845703px;">We’re still in the early, early days, but we think quantum computing can help solve some of the world’s most challenging computer science problems. We’re particularly interested in how quantum computing can advance machine learning, which can then be applied to virtually any field: from finding the cure for a disease to understanding changes in our climate. </span></div>
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bjflanaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12039374267922489893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9857219.post-46543133977536140952013-07-27T11:36:00.000-05:002013-08-25T08:56:04.542-05:00Quantum boost for artificial intelligence<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Quantum computers able to learn could attack larger sets of data</div>
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<li style="float: left; list-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0.3em 0px 0px;"><span class="vcard"><a class="fn" href="http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-boost-for-artificial-intelligence-1.13453#auth-1" style="border: 0px; color: #5c7996; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Devin Powell</a></span></li>
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<time datetime="2013-07-26" pubdate="">26 July 2013</time></div>
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<time datetime="2013-07-26" pubdate=""><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-boost-for-artificial-intelligence-1.13453">Nature</a></time></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Quantum computers of the future will have the potential to give artificial intelligence a major boost, a series of studies suggests.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">These computers, which encode information in 'fuzzy' quantum states that can be zero and one simultaneously, have the ability to someday solve problems, such as breaking encryption keys, that are beyond the reach of ‘classical’ computers.</span></div>
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Algorithms developed so far for quantum computers have typically focused on problems such as breaking encryption keys or searching a list — tasks that normally require speed but not a lot of intelligence. But in a series of papers posted online this month on the arXiv preprint server<sup style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 0;"><a class="ref-link" href="http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-boost-for-artificial-intelligence-1.13453#b1" id="ref-link-1" style="color: #5c7996; text-decoration: none;" title="Rebentrost, P., Mohseni, M. & Lloyd, S. preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.0471 (2013).">1</a>, <a class="ref-link" href="http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-boost-for-artificial-intelligence-1.13453#b2" id="ref-link-2" style="color: #5c7996; text-decoration: none;" title="Lloyd, S., Mohseni, M. & Rebentrost, P. preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.0411 (2013).">2</a>, <a class="ref-link" href="http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-boost-for-artificial-intelligence-1.13453#b3" id="ref-link-3" style="color: #5c7996; text-decoration: none;" title="Lloyd, S., Mohseni, M. & Rebentrost, P. preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.0401 (2013).">3</a></sup>, Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and his collaborators have put a quantum twist on AI.</div>
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