The Quantum Brain
SATINOVER, JEFFREY
"So that was two years down the drain," Joyce said. To make up for lost time, Holyoak flew to China to buy some domesticated breeders. But then the eggs they laid weren't fertile. In the end...
...But to really understand where science is leading us may well require a great deal more intellectual discipline and envelopepushing than rock-ribbed reductionists, tradition-minded theists, or New-Age hand-wavers are comfortable with: "Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there," in the words of Richard Feynman, the renowned theoretical physicist...
...The truth is I have no idea what to suggest...
...It was only a matter of time before the flaw was uncovered...
...Not a few see confirmation of ancient religious notions...
...But as modern biological science has penetrated down into the subcellular levels of living matter, and in particular those that constitute the brain, it has indeed begun to encounter the eerie quantum effects that have confounded physicists for a century...
...There is not a single working medical device or treatment, not a vehicle, not a communications technology, not an industry that isn't based on this assumption...
...Our understanding of who we are, where we came from, our standing in the greater scheme of things, and where we're going, all looks soon to suffer a dramatic change...
...you ask...
...In the human brain, the amplification of quantum freedom happens via means that preserve the appearance, at our daytoday scale, that we, and our universe, are completely mechanical...
...When I pressed him for details, though, he cut me short: "I make my living off this consulting, so I'm not going to give you a lot of information to spread around...
...Finally, advances in neuroscience allow us to penetrate so far down into the microscopic substructure of the brain-well below the level of neurons themselves, into their structure--that not only might we find quantum effects there, physicists fully expect them to be present...
...General Relativity showed that time itself slows down in a gravitational field.When the photon leaves the box, the mass of the box-plus-timer-plus-photon gets smaller, the nearby gravitational field goes down, so the passing of time in the vicinity of the box speeds up...
...Electrons may jump from here to there for no reason whatsoever, but planets don't...
...But then the taste was worlds away from the swamp...
...Note: We're not talking about making the ball so hot that it glows by itselfl) [] If you shine light on metal, it will eject electrons--"the photoelectric effect...
...The mechanical view predicts that there ought to be some kind of regular, internal clock that orders its departure, but there is none...
...These effects are not analogies, they are real, and, as we will see, it is only by considering them that we can begin to understand the building blocks of life...
...I don't know if he ever will...
...The growth of your account-presuming you let it be-is nonlinear, not straight line, because the base upon which the interest is calculated changes as a consequence of the interest added to it during the prior update...
...Because the motion is "random" there is a chance that all the molecules will just happen to dart into the extreme upper left corner, all at the same time, suffocating us...
...The very mechanical premises upon which science has been built may be overturned by science itself...
...An evolving 'quantum morality'...is necessarily...pluralistic" she writes...
...They may have as much intelligence as we have, quite possibly more...
...But he could think of no refutation...
...But when scientists finally did figure out the answers, most of them received a tremendous shock and some had an equally tremendous hope...
...There was only one problem: The frog I brought wasn't raised by Holyoak...
...In the words of Harvard astronomer Margaret Geller:"Why should [the universe] have a point...
...As a result: "For decades, paper after paper was written in an attempt to resolve...
...Some of these "quantum exits" take the strange phenomena found at the quantum, subatomic scale and apply them wholesale to human life because of the analogies one can make between, for example, the freedom of choice we believe that we, as people, have and the "freedom of choice" that electrons apparently have...
...In either case, the cue stick lies long abandoned...
...Wrote spectator L4on 1Kosenfeld: To Bohr, this was a heavy blow...
...For example, the quantum "uncertainty" in the position of a typical atom that's part of a typical cell might be on the order of about 10 -8 centimeters (two one-hundred-millionths of an inch...
...In the end they had no choice but to collect thousands of bullfrogs from the wild again and to teach them to eat pellets...
...I sauteed it for three or four minutes and then drizzled it with a lemon-caper sauce," Berry explained, settling in next to me...
...Think of it, if you like, as a "vibration;' like the agitation caused by heat, only smaller...
...The EP1K paper is one of the most elegantly reasoned in all of intellectual history...
...And he hasn't sold that many of 'em...
...For the theory that solved these dilemmas~quanturn mechanics~gave the following Delphic answers: Nothing at all in the physical universe "causes" an alpha particle to jump out of its nucleus when it does...
...In particular, a cascade of advances has emerged from physics, neuroscience, and computer studies that shows the brain's actual operation to be very different from what has long been thought...
...A beam of the right color light, no matter how faint, instantly generates electricity in a metal because, even if the light is spread out like energy, it is at the same time a billiard ball-like particle that knocks an electron out of its orbit...
...Most understood little enough about the subtleties of the mechanistic point of view, and of scientific method, to allow them to dismiss it without ever seriously experiencing the power of its claims...
...In many ways, these discoveries only reinforce the idea that everything the brain does can be explained entirely via mechanism...
...defeating everybody....Like a game of chess, Einstein all the time with new examples...
...And more: "It would be wonderful to find in the laws of nature a plan prepared by a concerned creator in which human beings played some special role...
...But in the last ten years, a renewed debate over reductionism and determinism shows clear signs of breaking out into the open...
...Very soon, however, he became hesitant...
...So far has this transformation gone that here in America, for instance, where it was once a requirement that a professor in any department in any reputable university be a "man of God" it is now rather an embarrassment should he admit to taking seriously such a thing...
...This kind of nonlinearity is not and cannot be chaotic...
...nor grains of sand...
...Bohr, a genial, unflappable Dane, paled visibly when Einstein first laid out his masterstroke...
...In part this was simply because the mathematical foundation of the new physics was so complex and esoteric that few apart from physicists and mathematicians really understood them...
...He lives in Liberty, Mississippi, now, far from the scene of his final frog fry...
...In response to quantum theory, three distinct camps emerged within the sciences...
...The rankest of speculators blended physics and (usually) Eastern mysticism without reservation, but were rarely able to express their ideas in mathematical form...
...In private they discussed its philosophical implications, but only on rare occasion did they allow their musings about "what it all meant" to be released in print...
...In the absence of definite evidence one way or the other, Einstein's argument against quantum weirdness was convincing to many...
...Now, as Berry set my dinner before me, it was hard to connect that memory with the thing on the plate...
...On the one hand, no meat is quite so recognizablemso luridly anatomical--as a pair of frog legs...
...Then he hung up...
...What's more, they are being mimicked by man-made machines...
...To others it was not...
...But rather than stewing in bittersweet memories, he's already in the throes of a new venture...
...The shock was unimaginable...
...If Einstein was right about quantum mechanics, he was utterly wrong about a theory the completion of which he himself called"the greatest satisfaction of my life" that which had led his colleagues to hail him as "the new Copernicus...
...But there are some who see something wholly new, fraught with both fantastic opportunity and terrible risk...
...There were and are a great many people who found this vision of reality horribly bleak...
...Not only that, it gets out in spite of the fact that the barrier keeping it in is too high for it to get out at all.Were the world really as tidy as scientists had thought, the alpha particle ought no more ever be able to get out of its nucleus than could a prisoner in a cell on Mcatraz instantly appear in San Francisco...
...Whether such statistically enforced determinism is really significantly different from mechanical determinism~and whether you ought to become a mystic because ofit~is a debate we can safely leave to the philosophers and poets...
...Then suddenly he was cartwheeling across the water, belly flashing like a green-and-yellow whirligig, trailing a ragged red streamer as if in an excess of joy...
...No one other than mystics and madmen could entertain such patently absurd notions...
...The question is whether it's possible that these effects aren't just averaged away...
...Hot, black bodies are black because energy comes in discrete units...
...Eventually, he broke off with the familiar remark that he "must sleep on it" But empirical tests of the EP1K argument were out of technological reach...
...But most sciences had no need to relate to the subatomic world anyway-what does electron "uncertainty" have to do with, say, sociology...
...The mathematics behind Einstein's argument was flawless...
...The growth is nonlinear, but it's also "monotonic"--it goes only up, it never declines or cycles or jumps about...
...But if the color of the light is more toward the red, it doesn't matter if the light has the intensity of an industrial laserman electron will never be spit out...
...Most serious scientists reject such analogizing because they know enough about how quantum mechanical effects "scale upward" to be convinced that any and all quantum weirdness is long gone by the time we are dealing with aggregates of gazillions of particles large enough to form people...
...Ironically, scientists in other fields saw themselves thereby as at last emulating physics--the gold standard of scientific inquiry...
...I will never forget the sight of the two opponents leaving the university club...
...The second item could be in the Andromeda galaxy, and this impossible, instantaneous "influence" would still hold...
...the EPR paradox], but not for thirty years was any real headway made on the matter...
...Holyoak chuckled beside me...
...Extraordinary claims require extraordina H evidence, and the claims of quantum theory were extraordinary beyond imagining...
...Once a frog got sick in one tray, his infection drained down to any neighbors beneath him...
...that entire atoms could have a place in both space and time as solid objects and yet infinitely spread out as ripples in the fabric of some undetectable medium...
...Einstein like a jack-in-the-box...
...We should reply by taking up the same example and showing the right way to speak about it...
...The portrait of a world in which causality no longer held absolute sway was not a true principle but must be an artifact of our ignorance of elusive, exceedingly subtle causes...
...Instead he drove me out to a pond and pointed a high-powered rifle out the truck window...
...And it will have a dramatic effect on both science and on scientists...
...If Niels Bohr was right, then reality itself would make no sense...
...There is another feature of chaos that will prove extremely important in the following discussion of quantum mechanics and brain function: Namely, chaotic systems amplify extremely small differences in initial conditions into dramatically divergent outcomes...
...These values (as we graphed them in algebra class) all lie on a parabola...
...In Einstein's dry formulation, "No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this)' Einstein sent Bohr a copy of the paper prior to publication...
...But there are many iterative, nonlinear systems that do illustrate chaos...
...of the photoelectric effect, of why certain hot bodies appeared black--these last three loose ends from classical physics all yielded to quantum theory alone...
...As we will also see, systems of coupled, iterative osdllators, in particular, are even more sensitive to initial conditions, and these are just that of which the fourth brain is composed...
...The quantum uncertainty of that atom, in other words (and that of any other constituent atoms), would amount to at most one-thousandth of the size of the organelle...
...One answer is: There exist structures in the human brain that appear peoCectly designed to capture quantum effects and amplify them via chaos, because in order to self-organize, they have adopted an iterarive form at every level~chemical, intracellular, network, and even social...
...it would just jump from one hour to next...
...Bohr from out of philosophical smoke clouds constantly searching for the tools to crush one example after the other...
...Our brains are, if you will, "quantum computers)' But they are not of the sort now making headlines...
...His attitude toward Bohr is now exactly like the attitude of the [opponents of relativity] towards him...
...Two years before, in 1928, at the previous Solvay meeting, Bohr's arguments had been simply brilliant, and Einstein, who rarely took second place to anyone, had been soundly defeated...
...If we are going to stick to this dammed quantum-jumping" complained one of its founders, "then I regret that I ever had anything to do with quantum theory" Furthermore, if subatomic particles can freely choose to come and go as they please, then perhaps old-fashioned claims as to our own nonmechanical nature aren't so archaic after all: Suddenly, the machinery of brain might prove the illusion, mind and will a more foundational reality.A number of the founders of quantum mechanics wondered out loud whether the ancient mystics might not be right after all: Perhaps there is a Player...
...It seems that at the foundation of matter lies not mere "stuff" but pure "information...
...By shifting so wholeheartedly to this point of view that not even life, not even human life, is exempted, science has found itself able to break open even seemingly impenetrable mysteries of mind: Learning, intelligence, intuition--all of these can now extensively be understood in wholly mechanical terms...
...Einstein had left the field of batde in retreat but certain that, even so, he was correct and quantum mechanics in error...
...For years, Albert Einstein had fiercely batfled Niels Bohr's emerging take on quantum mechanics...
...If the color is right for the metal, or more toward the blue, an electron will always be spit out at once, no matter how faint the light...
...But they intuited and guessed and analogized at length, sometimes wildly, sometimes presciently, in an attempt to draw out the large-scale antimechanical implications of quantum mechanics...
...The smallest organelle within that cell might be 10 -5 centimeters across (two onehundredthousandths of an inch...
...N ot long after that meal I finally managed to track down Bud Culley, the grand old man of frog farming...
...It's hard to imagine how such a slight additional vibration could have any significant effect in living processes, especially when everything is vibrating far more wildly in uncoordinated fashion anyway, because of heat...
...Holyoak later denied this version of events, but Joyce had no reason to bad-mouth the operationmquite the opposite...
...Let me suggest a Sancerre," the sommelier murmured as soft jazz wafted down from hidden speakers above him...
...A few were quietly mystical, a few wondered whether in quantum mechanics lay the secret of fife, of will, of consciousness, even of God...
...I find sadness in doubting that we will...
...Indeed, chaos arises wholly because of them...
...Often these implications had a distinctly trendy bias...
...I've been watchin' him work on this thing for a long time, and he's never quite gotten it," Joyce said...
...that events everywhere were being coordinated outside the bounds of causality by some unimaginable "influence": God playing dice...
...Einstein had spent the previous year developing a "thought experiment" of exceeding subtlety, the mere devising of which seemed to reveal a necessary contradiction at the heart of the quantum theory...
...This has given some hope that we may find in quantum theory an exit from the dead-end trap of a world that "has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference" in the words of the eminent evolutionist Richard Dawkins...
...Our free and undetermined moral choices...are like an electron's virtual transitions...
...Strictly (i.e., mathematically) speaking, chaos does not mean disorder...
...Of course, none of them seemed to have any larger implications about the nature of man, of free will, of life, of God.And to the man in the street they were utterly uninteresting: 9 Why does a radioactive nucleus spit out an alpha particle now but not then, and completely at random...
...Yet these were in truth its major claims, and to date no experiment had ever produced results to contravene it...
...But here, in the elegant finish of this dish, in its seamless transformation from bullet kill to haute cuisine, lay another sto W . All nature's stubbornness, I thought, is no match for a good imagination.We've taught pigs to find mushrooms and dogs to lead the blind, corn to manufacture its own pesticide and watermelons to grow without seeds.Why shouldn't the Holyoaks of the world one day domesticate anything on legs, turning frog farmers into princes of industry...
...Whatever 'mysteries' may or may not lie within the domain of quantum physics" they say,"these do not concern us...
...56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR [] Summer Reading Issue 2001 These do not seem like earth-shaking quandaries...
...But there were a few who did understand its power and hoped that eventually it would somehow be proven wrong...
...In short, "the reductionist hypothesis may be still be a topic for controversy among philosophers, but among the great majority of active scientists I think it is accepted without question...
...Quantum theory is simply irrelevant to anyone but physicists, theoretical chemists and New Age philosophers--and only the first two understand it~sort of...
...But now change the "3" to "3.6"' and make the equation iterative--in other words, at each step use as x the value of y generated by the prior value ofx...
...Here is a simple example: Consider the sequence of numbers generated by the equation y - 3(x - x2), as we allow x to take on different values, one after the other, starting with 0: 3, 0, -9, -24...
...Einstein, a majestic figure, walking calmly with a faint ironical smile, and Bohr trotting along by his side, extremely upset...
...For example, if instead of seeding our iterative equation with 0.5, we seed it with 0.500000000000000000001, then within a handful of iterations, the sequence will be completely different than were we to seed it with 0.500000000000000000000...
...So it went on for a while, with growing wonder at the subtlety of the argument...
...No, this won't do, we must try all over again...we must make it quite clear...
...The meetings at Solvay, sponsored every few years by an extraordinarily wealthy Belgian industrialist and amateur physicist, had become the physicists'& facto tourney royal--jousts and all...
...Clearly we were farther from the mark than we first thought...
...If you insisted that your time measurement was absolutely perfect, then your weight (energy) measurement would be absolutely uncertain--a range of plus or minus infinity!--and vice versa...
...Theirs is a commonsense point of view that works quite well...
...In the century since it first appeared, quantum theory has proven itself the most successful theory in the history of science...
...All of modern medicine, for example, depends upon the machine point of view that we adopt...
...They hoped, in other words, that one day scientists themselves might discover a fundamental law of the universe that was not wholly mechanical but in some sense "free...
...But if quantum processes are the source within the human brain of genuine thought--as also of genuine will, intention, and choice--then the quantum computers we are on the verge of designing (or whose evolution we are at least facilitating) may turn themselves into genuine sentient beings...
...Standing apart from the mere "physical system" he everywhere spins the shots, making everything happen this way rather than that...
...But now the revolution: It appears possible that instead of averaging freedom away as usual, the human brain, itself a machine, has nonetheless evolved a unique structure that harnesses subatomic "choice" concentrates it, and amplifies it upward, scale by scale, taking advantage, as we will see, of the strange facts of"chaos" Of all things, it's the machine in our head that lets us transcend our own mechanicality...
...His tray sys' tem showed Chinese and Brazilian influences...
...All of the material universe does in fact seem knit together into a single, mutually influencing whole---or, perhaps, a whole everywhere influenced simultaneously, and coordinated, by "something" not itself a physical part of that universe...
...In doing so, it has demonstrated that at its foundation, matter itself does not behave like a machine at all...
...If so, the actions generated by the brain, and of human society as a whole, would share at least some of the absolute freedom, mysteriousness, and nonmechanicality of the quantum world...
...But if the color is wrong and the energy of the light is too low, it doesn't matter how many particles you throw at the metal, none of the electrons will budge--like throwing thousands of PingPong balls at a bowling ball stuck in a rut...
...Then he laughed despite himself and leaned in closer...
...If we included every value of x between 0 and 1, and between 1 and 2, and...the values ofy would form a smooth curve...
...Then the disease struck...
...What point...
...Once you begin studying phenomena that require trillions of subatomic events, as we do in studying chemistry, biology, medicine, all the mystery averages out and you are left with pure mechanism...
...He...walked from one person to another, trying to persuade them all that this could not be true, because if Einstein was right this would mean the end of physics...
...These four advances suggest the following question: Even if quantum effects are present within brain cells at a sut~ciently large scale to affect neuronal substructures, is there any reason to suppose that these effects possibly influence everyday life...
...If you heat up any completely black object--like a bowling ball--why is the heat it radiates back at you invisible, and why is it always heat, that is, "infrared radiation," and always in the exact same distribution of infrared "colors...
...It was a move of dazzling beauty and simplicityuindeed, in a class never before dreamed of---such that the outcome of the rest of the game, and the match, seemed decided at a stroke...
...Is he dreaming...
...It was impossible...
...The fact that the needle behaved in such THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 Summer Reading Issue,2001 59 a definite manner...I remember to this day...the deep and lasting impression this experience made on me.There had to be something behind the objects, something that was hidden...
...The mystery of radioactive deca...
...It amounts to much only on the scale of atomic and subatomic particles...
...Either quantum theory was fundamentally incomplete, or reality was weird and contradictory beyond imagining...
...Popularizations of chaos theory often claim that a chaotic sequence is in some sense "free" and that the presence of chaos in human physiology proves the existence of free will.This is incorrect...
...His colleague L6on 1Kosenfeld described how they reacted: This onslaught came down upon us as a bolt from the blue...
...Nor are they from some far distant future...
...And this would obtain even were the second object so distant from the yet-to-be-measured first that measuring the first object here could not possibly have an effect, soon enough, there...
...nor boulders...
...But once science arose, the universe swiftly began to yield its secrets...
...With this idea as their starting point, they and their followers began to experience an uninterrupted string of successes...
...If human nature remains true to its history, we may expect both the risk and the opportunity to be realized, with much gain and much loss...
...For the second time he wrote the Nobel Prize committee, describing Schr6dinger and Heisenberg as "the two men who above everyone else deserve the Nobel Prize for physics;' adding "I am convinced that this theory undoubtedly contains a piece of definitive truth...
...Shortly before dawn he found it...
...It does not in any way make those rules disappear...
...The world that we study--including our own everyday lives--would behave not the slightest bit differently, nor less mechanically deterministic, depending upon whether quantum theory is right or wrong, or upon what it 'means" For that reason we continue to treat everything as a machine--cells and man and his brain included--because when we do so, we make enormous strides in our understanding and our ability to predict, and we don't we trip up...
...Physics itself was now saying that, far from being reducible to "simple mechanical interactions" matter itself--the very foundation of the machine viewpoint--was looking less like a machine and "more like a thought...
...Frog doesn't need a lot more than that...
...Chaos merely sets a limit on our capacity to deduce the rules--hence the mechanical causes M in retrospect...
...It was a terrible irony...
...K 62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 Summer Reading Issue 2001...
...Einstein saw that in the end, quantum theory required that the entire universe, no matter how remote its parts from each other, be woven together into a seamless unity, somehow orchestrated in concert...
...Such systems are "iterative"The bestknown example of an iterative system is the "compounded return" on your bank account...
...nor we...
...I ain't got nothin' but hollow-points in here for shootin' hogs...
...quantum Longings W hile it is true that at the turn of the last century almost every fundamental physical phenomenon seemed understood, three did resist explanation by the mechanical view of nature...
...Nor any mornings at Solvay thereafter...
...Chaos in this sense means a sequence (say of numbers) that is strictly mechanically determined by some fixed rule, but if you don't know the rule, you cannot figure it out just by looking at the numbers...
...Perhaps reality is truly weird...
...At the subcellular level, matter itself actually looks and behaves (in the words of one physicist)"more like a thought" than like the cogs of a machine...
...It showed that if quantum mechanics was complete--meaning that its effects were produced not by undetected causes but by no causes whatsoever--then the very physical condition (the "reality," as Einstein termed it) of, say, two or more separate events (or things) was contingent upon our measuring and knowing at least one of them...
...For an ever more ravenous, ever more ingenious society, wild game is just another work in progress...
...A growing number of physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists are convinced this is so, and are even now devising ways for the first artificial quantum brain to organize itself into existence...
...These hopes were rekindled with the emergence of the strange theory of quantum mechanics...
...nor could they conceive of tests that could prove them wrong...
...Author Dana Zohar, for example, has gone so far as to find in quantum mechanics the basis for a "new morality" in which adultery is no less a virtue than faithfulness...
...But it turns out that self-organizing ensembles of every kind have in common a tendency toward chaos...
...Using the equations of General Relativity, Bohr showed that the change in mass caused by the loss of a single photon is reciprocated by a change in the scale of time.The product of the uncertainty of the time and the uncertainty in the energy exactly equals that minimum uncertainty predicted by quantum theory...
...The great Danish physicist spent the entire night awake, searching for a crack in Einstein's diamantine logic...
...Oh, that was priceless...
...Nothing in the world causes the particle to jump, discovered the first quantum mechanics...
...Tender and buttery, with a subtle, amphibian chew, it was so mild that the Sancerre almost overwhelmed it...
...Steven Weinberg, winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics and an eloquent spokesman for the machine point of view, put it this way: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless...
...All agreed that the question would be settled not by philosophy but by mathematics and experiment...
...Listening to him, I realized that Holyoak's frog farm hadn't cracked the amphibian code after all, but neither was it a Ponzi scheme...
...As always, Einstein was gracious in defeat...
...This was not a simple battle over abstract philosophical or mathematical formulations...
...Later that morning Bohr showed Einstein his discovery...
...Holyoak had done his homework...
...But the first premise of science is that everything happens solely as a result of causes in the world...
...We've got the only frogs we know in the world that are entirely on pelleted food...
...Second, "experiments have now shown that what bothered Einstein is not a debatable point but the observed behavior of the world...
...By the end of the nineteenth century, scientists believed they had uncovered almost all of the fun&mental laws of physics.These laws were all purely mechanical, and out of their mechanical interactions arises every phenomenon we experience at every scale...
...jumping out fresh every morning...
...E]verything else was abandoned: We had to clear up such a misunderstanding at once...
...Though the interest rate is constant, the amount of additional money you earn each cycle changes as a function of how much money you have already accumulated...
...I had been told, on good authority, that this was the finest authentic Southern restaurant in the country and that the chef, David Berry, was a big fan of farm-raised game.When I had called to ask if he would prepare one of Holyoak's frogs for me, he had agreed immediately...
...that the universe was filled with events that had no cause whatsoever...
...the player long gone...
...The timer tells you when the photon was let go...
...Earlier that day I had dropped off a pair of bullfrog legs at the Grill's kitchen...
...and so on...
...They're on pellets from metamorphosis on up...
...The absolute truth of causalitymthat nothing ever occurs without wholly sufficient material causes that can yield but one resultmis a vision of reality upon which all of science was based, and once it came to Einstein~when he was just a little boy, sick in bed--it never left him: "I experienced a wonder...as a child of 4 or 5, when my father showed me a compass...
...But bacteria about wiped 'em out...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 Summer Reading Issue 2001 101 Enlightenment, science has argued that it is both impossible and unnecessary to know whether the opening break was that of a cosmic Minnesota Fats of incomparable foresight or of a merely comic amateur...
...About the only thing I've ever done with frogs is flatten 'em with a post...
...But Monod either didn't know or (more likely) dismissed as irrelevant to biological systems the fact that physics was moving on into utterly confounding territory...
...Seed" the equation with an initial value of 0.5...
...This doesn't sound weird, but it's akin to discovering that time only comes in units of hours so you couldn't ever experience or measure time passing during an hour...
...Paul Ehrenfest, a friend of both men and a major contributor to physics in his own right, would later describe the climax of that earlier conference: Brussels--Solvay was fine!...Bohr...
...weighing the box tells you how much energy the photon has-because of the famous relationship between energy and mass: E=mc 2, the pinnacle of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity...
...At any scale large enough to be of concern to human beings, the net effect of all that freedom is zero--it just cancels out...
...Call it Bullfrog Reality...
...M any days later, at the Horseradish Grill in Atlanta, I sat at a gleaming oak bar and awaited my dinner...
...Bohr had at first triumphed, but Einstein fought back and at long last seemed to have won...
...Chaotic behavior can arise only in systems whose state at any moment in time, for instance, is some function of its prior state, though not in every such system...
...They're down to less than twenty thousand now...
...The succeeding morning would not bring yet another reversal of fortune...
...Quantum uncertainty~ if there really is such a thing~may allow for "freedom" philosophically, but to depend on it as an explanation for freedom at the scale of our everyday experience is actually to make the case for determinism: By the time all the untold trillions of individual "freedoms" are added up and averaged, the proportion of freedom left to something large--a human being, a human brain~is so tiny a fraction that it would be utterly beyond detection...
...But I am almost without reservation pro Bohr and contra Einstein...
...The sequence is determinisfc yet chaotic...
...More precisely, such systems demonstrate so-called nonlinear dynamics, of which chaos is a particular form...
...For these reasons, a chaotic sequence looks random, but it isn't--it is 100 percent mechanical...
...The mechanical view predicts that the hotter the bowling ball, the more the radiated energy should be seen as visible light, starting with red, running through the rainbow, and then into the ultraviolet...
...Among the physics elite, a pure meritocracy prevailed...
...Living matter itself was understood to be nothing more than an especially complicated factory of molecular machinery...
...Most, however, believed that in the end, mechanical determinism was bound to win out, somehow...
...Some of them will be set free to evolve themselves in Darwinian fashion, hardware and all...
...Behind me, the sun-baked evening crowd lounged about in summer dresses and linen suits, under the heavy beams of the vaulted ceiling, as a fire blazed in the corner...
...Bohr was devastated...
...In the evening's whiskey-colored light, I could see a bullfrog's eyes floating on the surface like soap bubbles, mesmerized by passing clouds...
...That this is so is not yet widely known to most biologists, but it soon will be...
...First among peers were the originators of quantum mechanics, along with others capable of carrying quantum theory forward--or of disputing it---on a rigorous mathematical basis...
...The third and largest camp is the vast body of competent scientists of every stripe without training in quantum mechanics, and often without interest in it...
...For all the millennia that human beings looked at the universe as guided, purposeful, and pregnant with meaning, its operations remained mysterious...
...This is a fact that has never been controverted...
...D'ya see how far that bullet blowed 'im...
...In a 58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 Summer Reading Issue 2001 sentence: Einstein showed that the notorious quantum "uncertainty" between time and energy--a necessary counterpart of uncertainty between position and momentum--could be avoided by weighing an object in a box that has lost a photon of light when a timer briefly opens a shutter...
...I had thought that the moral of Holyoak's story was clear: Some things just aren't meant to be domesticated...
...and there were other experiments, exceedingly important ones, whose results could be explained in no other way...
...But, gracious though he may have been in withdrawing from the field at Solvay, he had hardly surrendered...
...Holyoak's stacked trays were natural breeding grounds for bacteria, Joyce said, especially if the frogs were overcrowded...
...More absurdly yet, under certain circumstances that Einstein and his colleagues teased out, their physical reality could be shown to be contingent upon our mere intention to measure one...
...Now the sequence looks like 0.9, 0.324, 0.788486,...The values of y will always remain between 0 and 1, no two values will ever be the same, and if you look at any snippet of the sequence, you will never be able to deduce the rule that generated it...
...The mechanical view predicts that as long as you shine enough light--and there ought to be some minimum--it shouldn't matter what the color is or how intense is the beam...
...Stripped of its slinky tights, each ligament, tendon, muscle, and articulated joint looked ready to leap across the room...
...The second camp consisted largely of a second tier of scientists, philosophers, and poets, who saw in quantum theory a long-hoped-for opening to a world of z mysticism and did everything they could to widen it--an opening that Einstein likewise saw and wanted to prove illusory, o 60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 Summer Reading Issue 2001 Allying with a few first-tier physicists-Heisenberg,Wolfgang Pauli (a close friend of the mystical psychiatrist C. G. Jung)-these scientists began a process of open philosophical speculation that irritated most serious physicists...
...I~ather amazingly, Einstein had neglected to take into account the peculiar effects of gravity required by his own theory of General Relativity, a theory of even greater scope than Special Relativity...
...Jacques Monod spoke unflinchingly on behalf of most scientists in his claim that "Man is a machine...
...The idea that the entire universe is nothing more than a "physical system"-that is, a machine--unfolding mechanically according to rigid and immutable laws began as the radical heresy of a few brave minds...
...Third, quantum effects can now be produced on very large scales~well into the visible--raising the speculation that perhaps the brain could embody quantum events large enough to have a significant effect on day-to-day functioning, a speculation most qualified physicists reject for mainly, but not entirely, good reasons...
...Quantum uncertainty is like the random motion of air molecules in a room...
...Seeing into this dark secret at the heart of the quantum, Einstein was certain beyond any doubt that the theory had to be fundamentally flawed, however seductively accurate it appeared in tests to date...
...As we will see, this allows for the possibility that very tiny effects, rather than being averaged away, can be, on the contrary, preserved and enlarged--but only in systems that are in every respect and at every scale iterative...
...almost nothing in modern medicine-hardly a single advance---has ever required that we abandon it...
...More powerfully than has any prior scientific discovery, the unlocking of the brain seems to confirm the scientists' hypothesis that everything--the mind of man included--is machine...
...It was something altogether sadder and more grand: A failed dream...
...Self-organizing systems are just that--precisely because iteration allows for the internal feedback that causes such a system to spontaneously establish global order...
...In great excitement, Bohr immediately started dictating to me the outline of such a reply...
...All this is terribly confounding to philosophers who seek to understand the world, and human fife, in terms with which they are already familiar...
...It's just a physical system, what point is there...
...The influence could even run backward in time...
...It turns out, however, that the amount of absolute "freedom" individually available to the bits and pieces of the universe is unbelievably tiny...
...Five years later, in 1935, Einstein and two colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, published a brief but overwhelmingly brilliant piece--referred to ever since as "EP1K" for their initials-asserting that quantum mechanics was true, as far as it went, but incomplete: It was but a "piece" of truth...
...The New Primordial Substance: Not Matter, but Information I n the meantime, the other sciences were undergoing rapid developments of their own, unrelated to the startling events in physics...
...Many scientists speak of a "crisis" brought about by the implications of quantum mechanics and look for something cleaner, more truly a"mechanics" to replace it and to restore the austere reductionism of the Enlightenment...
...he said over a crackling phone line...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR I Summer Reading Issue 2001 61 Furthermore, no two numbers in a chaotic sequence are ever identical, though the sequence returns at roughly orderly intervals to nearby numbers...
...Subtle quantum effects in the brain afford us a capacity we would not otherwise have, yet to make THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 Summer Reading Issue 2001 57 maximum use of such effects our natural brains are now designing even better synthetic ones.These employ quantum principles directly, not, as in the human brain, in subtle and nearly invisible fashion...
...Vast, synthetic, self-evoMng, superintelligent, and completely sentient computers must surely sound like pure science fiction, but they are not...
...the proper term is "deterministic chaos...
...But it is a statistical certainty that such a thing is not going to happen...
...Holyoak had promised to give me a frog before I left the hatchery, but when the time came, he said the North American Raniculture Research Center was locked...
...The other sciences were experiencing one triumph after another not by abandoning a long-held belief in mechanical determinism but by for the first time embradng it...
...Two summers ago, that building was full of frogs" he said...
...a]t first not understood at all...then...
...It just does so,"whenever it wishes...
...It's a great summer wine from the Loire valley, with a bit of a tang to stand up to what you'll be eating...
...Only a child could truly love the claims of quantum mechanics that Bohr championed: That physical particles lacked fixed positions and velocities...
...Brussels, October 1930 ~ A struggle of Titans over the last riddles of the universe" was how one writer put it...
...First, the human brain is proving to look like a self-organizing computer that teaches itself and learns by experience, something once thought impossible...
...his indoor operation was similar to Culley's.Yet after thirty-five years of catching frogs and feeding them pellets, tinkering with automatic feeders and inventing vaccinators, the Future Frog Farmers of America were no closer to dropping their first name...
...Einstein was explicit: Upon its outcome rested the entire enterprise of science, and its triumph over superstition, religion, and magic...
...But this evening, in a flash of genius, Bohr appeared to have turned the tables on him...
Vol. 34 • July 2001 • No. 6
