IdeaFestival

Photosynthesis a quantum process

Once thought of as a fleeting and exotic physical phenomena, multiple-state existence, otherwise known as quantum coherence, has been observed in living plant tissue at room temperature.

Efficiently turning light into plant energy, photosynthesis is a quantum process that takes full advantage of the weird physics at atomic scales. Wired:

The analogy I like is if you have three ways of driving home through rush hour traffic. On any given day, you take only one. You don’t know if the other routes would be quicker or slower. But in quantum mechanics, you can take all three of these routes simultaneously. You don’t specify where you are until you arrive, so you always choose the quickest route,' said Greg Scholes, a University of Toronto biophysicist.

Scholes’ findings, published Wednesday in Nature, are the strongest evidence yet for coherence — the technical name for multiple-state existence — in photosynthesis.

What other biology might host this phenomenon?

Wayne

Wikipedia: quantum biology

Depression changes how we see the world

Sufferers from depression are more likely to focus on the big picture:

People who have suffered from major depression are significantly better than other people at seeing a metaphorical forest, while the non-depressed are more alert to the trees, according to this study published a few months back in The Journal of Neuroscience... The paper suggests that depression isn't just a disease of emotion and thought--that it also alters perception.

Full post at the Big Think is here.

Wayne

The mind of music

While we're increasingly able to map regions of the mind to certain conscious states - we know for example that the pre-frontal cortex plays an executive role in decision making - grand reductive efforts have failed spectacularly to map its streaming, conscious, self-aware state to a corresponding molecule-by-molecule brain state. We're left with a nascent understanding of regions of the brain and very little understanding of how they interact to produce your experience of a satisfying walk in the park or the thrill I get from stories of exploration.

To demonstrate the point, Daniel Levitin points out that by getting a pail of water from a river, a scientist can study the water that's in the pail, but not - in the fullest sense - the river itself. That's the "problem of science," he remembers the philosopher Alan Watts once saying.

He and David Byrne, who you may recognize from the Talking Heads, discuss in this SEED Salon the hold of music in this context of its analyzability: why should these pleasing, regular sounds have such universal appeal? And how can we know why? Unlike the mind, music can, at the risk of losing its intelligibility, be stripped to its essential elements by removing rhythm or melody or pitch.

All is not lost though. Levitin, loosely quoting another artist, says the goal of art or music might in some sense to activate those feelings of being co-participants in a great work of art or performance or exploration, a feeling that may be due in no small part to the recent discovery of mirror neurons.

Who knows whether the problem of experience will ever be fully understood, but the study and enjoyment of music, and perhaps, performance, might offer one approach to one of the enduring mysteries of the human experience.

The other participant you might recognize id David Byrne of the Talking Heads.

Wane

"Lost:" From Eternity to Here

Alan Boyle asks the question at Cosmic Log, how well does "Lost" treat time travel? And enlisting the aid of Caltech theoretical physicist and author of the book "From Eternity to Here," Sean Carroll, answers "not bad at all." Traversing the logical paradoxes in time travel is tricky business, but Lost manages it without losing touch with the underlying physics of it all. For example, if life is one grand exchange of energy for information, then as Carroll views it, going back in time to change the future violates one binding law.

The way Carroll sees it, the mysteries of time - including the permanence of the past, as well as predestination versus free will in the future - focus on the cosmic concept known as entropy. Entropy is generally defined as the progression from order to disorder, from useful energy to useless energy equilibrium, from an ice cube to a puddle of lukewarm water.

Our universe appears to moving irrevocably from a state of low entropy (the big bang) to high entropy (the Big Chill). That means the past has less entropy than the future ... and that, in turn, means you can't go back and change things. 'The way the laws of physics work, we're never going to experience anything going backward in time from our own point of view,' Carroll said.

Even for time travel, there are rules. Boyle:

Carroll's book isn't so much about the impossibility of time travel as it is about that bigger mystery of entropy. Why does the arrow of time fly in just one direction, and where did that arrow come from, anyway? Does it make sense to talk about what happened before the arrow flew?

Some physicists would say such questions can't be discussed in scientific terms. But Carroll isn't one of those physicists. After explaining in detail what we know about entropy and its relation to the arrow of time, he moves on to the more speculative side of the issue.

The festival has been fortunate in the past few years to host John Barrow, Brian Greene and Michio Kaku among other theoretical physcists. Wouldn't it be cool to have Carroll at the IdeaFestival too?

Wayne

Wikipedia: Arrow of time

Slime mold, network designer

For the slime mold, its "core competency" is finding the shortest route to food, which makes it incredibly efficient. So efficient, in fact, that transportation networks, and perhaps networks in general, could be improved.

Wayne

Wikipedia: Biomimicry

"Sketch furniture," or performance manufacturing

When an action as simple as tracing an object in the air can result in a manufactured piece of furniture, the wall separating virtual and physical reality becomes a little less relevant. The words "thinkering" and "performance manufacturing" leap to mind.

Or for any Trek fans out there, how about "Earl Grey, hot"?

Wayne

"Dune" in Vancouver for 2010 games

First seen in North America at the 2009 IdeaFestival, Daan Roosegaarde's "Dune" has been installed in Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Thanks Alice for the heads up!

An account of his festival presentation and a video interview can be seen on the blog.

Wayne

Business next: When atoms become like bits

Check out Wired's story, "In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms are the New Bits," which highlights a key business and manufacturing macro-trend: Atoms are increasingly being manipulated as easily as information bits.

Applied to the competitive landscape, innovative ideas can take a more direct route from concept to manufacture. Whether that future happens or not remains, of course, to be seen, but with print-on-demand 3D objects increasingly common, the entrepreneur with a novel idea stands a better chance today than, say, Professor Bob Kerns, who futilely took on Detroit in his quest to manufacture the intermittent wiper blade in the movie, Flash of Genius. Wired :

Today, Kearns would do it differently. As before, he would have made the first prototype in his basement. But rather than building a factory, he would have had the electronics fabbed by one company and the enclosure made by another. He then would have paid a wiper manufacturer in China to create a custom assembly with these components. They would have shipped straight to his customers, the car companies, and the whole process would have happened in months, not years — too fast for big companies to beat him. No factory, no lawsuits, no madness. He could have fulfilled his dream of turning his invention into a company without tilting at windmills.

Related, can post-institutional methods first pioneered on the web match this emerging post-industrial landscape?
Wayne

Chess intelligence, a 1,000 year song and the "Calculus of Friendship"

Links from my feed reader today:

• Former world champion, Garry Kasperov describes what kind of intelligence it takes to master chess.
• What might your speech intonations be telling the listener? Empathy is like music to the ears.
• "An infinite piece repeating every thousand years," the 1,000 year song by Longplayer has now been making music for over 10 years. You can listen here.
• TierneyLab discusses how monkeys and humans tend to rationalize their choices.
• Inferred only over large cosmological distances, could dark energy be detected in the lab?
• Two of the most supple thinkers about information and networking, Ethan Zuckerman and David Weinberger, blog Georgetown law professor Julie Cohen's recent presentation to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The video is here.
• It takes "quite a lot of phonological awareness to turn 'l8r' into 'homework' or 'hmwrk'". How does texting affect learning?
• Hunkering down for the planet's winter, has the Martian rover Spirit become a lander after five years?
• The secret to happiness could be an hourly wage.
• What do physicists dream - and worry - about?
• SEED writes about the poignant relationship between math teacher and pupil documented in the new book, "The Calculus of Friendship." You can listen to one exchange in this recording.
• The image above taken by the robotic explorer Cassini is of the Saturn moon Tethys appearing behind Titan. The atmosphere of a very hydrologically active Titan can clearly be seen. Click to enlarge.

Wayne

Image credit: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA

An Owl in flight, Bullet time

Wow. Just wow.

As a raptor, the owl enjoys a number of natural advantages, not the least of which is its stealth, the very meaning of which seems to be embodied in this image.

It also brought to mind the film making technique "bullet time" popularized by John Gaeta in The Matrix.

Hat tip: TYWKIWDBI via Clive Thompson

Wayne