Quantum Criticality in Living Systems

phys.org  |  Stuart Kauffman, from the University of Calgary, and several of his colleagues have recently published a paper on the Arxiv server titled 'Quantum Criticality at the Origins of Life'. The idea of a quantum criticality, and more generally quantum critical states, comes perhaps not surprisingly, from solid state physics. It describes unusual electronic states that are are balanced somewhere between conduction and insulation. More specifically, under certain conditions, current flow at the critical point becomes unpredictable. When it does flow, it tends to do so in avalanches that vary by several orders of magnitude in size. 

Ferroelectric metals, like iron, are one familiar example of a material that has classical critical point. Above a critical temperature of 1043 degrees K the magnetization of iron is completely lost. In the narrow range approaching this point, however, thermal fluctuations in the electron spins that underly the magnetic behavior extend over all length scales of the sample—that's the scale invariance we mentioned. In this case we have a continuous phase transition that is thermally driven, as opposed to being driven by something else like external pressure, magnetic field, or some kind of chemical influence.

Quantum criticality, on the other hand, is usually associated with stranger electronic behaviors—things like high-temperature superconductivity or so-called heavy fermion metals like CeRhIn5. One strange behavior in the case of heavy fermions, for example, is the observation of large 'effective mass'—mass up to 1000 times normal—for the conduction electrons as a consequence of their narrow electronic bands. These kinds of phenomena can only be explained in terms of the collective behavior of highly correlated electrons, as opposed to more familiar theory based on decoupled electrons. 

Experimental evidence for critical points in quantum phase transitions of materials like CeRhIn5 has only recently been found. In this case the so-called "Fermi surface," a three-dimensional map representing the collective energy states of all electrons in the material, was seen to have large instantaneous shifts at the critical points. When electrons across the entire Fermi surface are strongly coupled, unusual physics like superconductivity is possible.

The potential existence of quantum critical points in proteins is a new idea that will need some experimental evidence to back it up. Kauffman and his group eloquently describe the major differences between current flow in proteins as compared to metallic conductors. They note that in metals charges 'float' due to voltage differences. Here, an electric fields accelerate electrons while scattering on impurities dissipates their energy fixing a constant average propagation velocity.

By contrast, this kind of a mechanism would appear to be uncommon in biological systems. The authors note that charges entering a critically conducting biomolecule will be under the joint influence of the quantum Hamiltonian and the excessive decoherence caused by the environment. Currently a huge focus in Quantum biology, this kind of conductance has been seen for example, for excitons in the light-harvesting systems. As might already be apparent here, the logical flow of the paper, at least to nonspecialists, quickly devolves into the more esoteric world of quantum Hamiltonians and niche concepts like 'Anderson localization.' 

To try to catch a glimpse of what might be going on without becoming steeped in formalism I asked Luca Turin, who actually holds the patent for semiconductor structures using proteins as their active element, for his take on the paper. He notes that the question of how electrons get across proteins is one of the great unsolved problems in biophysics, and that the Kauffman paper points in a novel direction to possibly explain conduction. Quantum tunnelling (which is an essential process, for example, in the joint special ops of proteins of the respiratory chain) works fine over small distances. However, rates fall precipitously with distance. Traditional hole and electron transport mechanisms butt against the high bandgap and absence of obvious acceptor impurities. Yet at rest our body's fuel cell generates 100 amps of electron current.

 

In suggesting that biomolecules, or at least most of them, are quantum critical conductors, Kauffman and his group are claiming that their electronic properties are precisely tuned to the transition point between a metal and an insulator. An even stronger reading of this would have that there is a universal mechanism of charge transport in living matter which can exist only in highly evolved systems. To back all this up the group took a closer look at the electronic structure of a few of our standard issue proteins like myoglobin, profilin, and apolipoprotein E.

In particular, they selected NMR spectra from the Protein Data Bank and used a technique known as the extended Huckel Hamiltonion method to calculate HOMO/LUMO orbitals for the proteins. For more comments on HOMO/LUMO orbital calculations you might look at our post on Turin's experiments on electron spin changes as a potential general mechanism of anesthesia. To fully appreciate what such calculations might imply in this case, we have to toss out another fairly abstract concept, namely, Hofstadter's butterfly as seen in the picture below.

What is Life?

scribd |  Schrodinger unleashed modern molecular biology with his “What Is Life?”.[1] The order in biology must be due, not to statistical processes attributable to statistical mechanics, but due to the stability of the chemical bond. In one brilliant intuition, he said, “It will not be a periodic crystal, for these are dull. “Genes” will be an aperiodic crystal containing a microcode for the organism.” (my quotes around “genes”.) He was brilliantly right, but insufficient. 

The structure of DNA followed, the code and genes turning one another on and off in some vast genetic regulatory network. Later work, including my own,[2] showed that such networks could behave with sufficient order for ontogeny or be enormously chaotic and no life could survive that chaos.

We biologists continue to think largely in terms of classical physics and chemistry, even about the origins of life, and life itself, despite Schrodinger’s clear message that life depends upon quantum mechanics.

 

In this short article, I wish to explore current “classical physics” ideas about the origin of life then introduce the blossoming field of quantum biology and within a newly discovered state of matter, The Poised Realm, hovering reversibly between quantum and “classical” worlds that may be fundamental to life. Life may be lived in the Poised Realm, with wide implications.

The widest implications are a hope for a union of the objective and subjective poles; the latter lost since Descartes’ Res cogitans failed and Newton triumphed with classical physics and Descartes’ Res extensa. What I shall say here is highly speculative.

2 Classical Physics and Chemistry Ideas about the Origin of Life

There are four broad views about the origin of life:

1) The RNA world view, dominant in the USA.

2) The spontaneous emergence of “collectively autocatalytic set”, which might be RNA, peptides, both, or other molecular species.

3) Budding liposomes or other self-reproducing vesicles.

4) Metabolism first, with linked sets of chemical reaction cycles, which are autocatalytic in the sense that each produces an extra copy of at least one product per cycle. 

Almost all workers agree that however molecular reproduction may have occurred, it is plausibly the case that housing such a system in a liposome or similar vesicle is one way to confine reactants. Recent work suggests that a dividing liposome and reproducing molecular system will synchronize divisions, so could form a protocell, hopefully able to evolve to some extent.[3]

Psychic Dictatorship in America

wikipedia |  The "I AM" Activity was founded by Guy Ballard (pseudonym Godfre Ray King) in the early 1930s. Ballard was well-read in theosophy and its offshoots, and while hiking on Mount Shasta looking for a supposed Esoteric Brotherhood, he said that he had encountered a man who introduced himself as Saint Germain, (as indicated in a historic account in the published book Unveiled Mysteries). Saint Germain is also known as the Comte de Saint-Germain, a historical 18th-century alchemist and a regular component of theosophical religions.^[3]

The Ballards said they began talking to the Ascended Masters regularly. They founded a publishing house, Saint Germain Press, to publish their books and began training people to spread their messages across the United States. These training sessions and "Conclaves" were held throughout the United States and were open to the general public and free of charge. A front page story in a 1938 edition of the Chicago Herald and Examiner noted that the Ballards "do not take up collections or ask for funds".[9]

 Some of the original members of I AM were recruited from the ranks of William Dudley Pelley’s organization the Silver Shirts.^{[citation needed]} Meetings became limited to members only after hecklers began disrupting their open meetings.^[2][3] Over their lifetimes, the Ballard's recorded nearly 4,000 Live dictations, which they said were from the Ascended Masters.^[1] Guy Ballard, his wife Edna, and later his son Donald became the sole "Accredited Messengers" of the Ascended Masters.^[3]


 

Chapter3PsychicDictatorship | Within a period of less than a decade, America has seen the rise and growth of two remarkable movements which bear an odd resemblance to each other.

William Dudley Pelley's "Silver Shirts of America," the first of the two movements, started originally simply as a metaphysical venture, the result of a personal psychic experience, which strangely enough, occurred while residing at a mountain cottage in California.

The Ballard "Mighty I AM" movement, as we have seen, started the same way, with its originator claiming his first contact with Comte de St. Germain on the side of a mountain in California.

The recent reports of the House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities, under the chairmanship of Martin Dies of Texas, have given the Pelley Silver Shirt movement front-page headlines, revealing to the public that for years it has not been a "metaphysical" organization as in the beginning, but is a political body which the Dies Committee believes to be un-American in that it is included in the "Nazi-Fascist groups" engaged in "aping the methods of foreign dictators" and attempting "to bring about a radical change in the American form of government." (Associated Press Dispatch, August 31, 1939.)

This book will reveal that the Ballard cult, too, is really a political movement and that its metaphysics, among other things, is largely engaged in an effort to bring about a weird sort of government in the United States.

The Pelley organization, as a matter of fact, supplied the pattern for some of the Ballard work, and evidence supporting this will soon be given. The Ballards, however, kept out of their movement the Silver Shirts' well-known hatred of the Jew, and have denounced other "enemies" instead.

There is so much similarity between the two organizations, it is well from the standpoint of psychological study and history to bring this out.

Pelley was a writer, a most clever wielder of the pen. Back in 1917 he was in the Orient on what he states to have been Christian missionary work; and after varied experiences there, he returned in 1919 to the United States to resume his writings and newspaper career. Around this time he became interested, he says, in "Secret Service investigations," and claimed to have had "contacts with some of the biggest men in the Hoover administration."

Ballard in his later years became also a writer, claims to have spent a couple of years in the Orient, and his "Secret Service connections" and his "Government contacts" are most remarkable, as we shall find.

In 1929 Pelley wrote the article which publicized his name throughout the nation. It was the story of a personal psychic experience entitled "Seven Minutes in Eternity," in which he related how, while residing at a lonely bungalow in the Sierra Madre Mountains near Pasadena California, he suddenly one night left his physical body lying on the bed and consciously soared away into that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler is supposed to return. But Pelley did return, and he told a graphic story of his sojourn there. Later he published messages purporting to come from "Masters," who began to direct and influence his new life work.

Similarly, Messenger Ballard, shortly after the appearance of the Pelley article, wrote up his own psychic experiences, which came to him in 1930, he said, while living at a lodge at the foot of a California mountain. He, too, left his body, and great and mighty "Ascended" Masters dictated marvelous discourses to him.

The American Magazine, which had published the Pelley story, was almost swamped, we understand, with mail in regard to it. It appears that the whole country at that time was having psychic experiences, and overnight almost Pelley had a tremendous following. All the letter-writing psychics in the land, it seems, wrote in giving their own personal experiences--and called for more from the fluent and graphic Pelley.

Obligingly, the new metaphysical leader gave his readers plenty of them, as indeed has the leader of the Mighty I AM cult which followed so soon after the start of Pelleyism.

Pelley's magazine, then named "The New Liberator," was started--an artistic but rather lurid creation--and he filled it with occult articles by himself and psychic messages from great "Masters." But never were they as numerous and as notorious as the Ballard "Ascended Masters."

Gradually, Pelley's psychism took on a political coloring and flavor, and it wasn't long before he was publishing stirring ideas and plans about a "New Government" in America--as did Ballard shortly afterwards.

Political headquarters were established at Asheville, N.C. in 1932, and his "Foundation for Christian Economics" was started at about the time Ballard was assertedly receiving his religio-patriotic messages over the marvelous "Light and Sound Ray" at his home in Chicago.

At the beginning of 1933, Pelley started his now famous Silver Legion, and felt the egoic thrill of fascist rule over his legionnaires or "storm troops" organized in many parts of the country. In much the same way have the fascistic-minded leaders of the Mighty I AM cult organized their patriotic bands of Minute Men --the "storm troops" of the movement.

In the fall of 1936, after Pelley had recovered from certain adverse court decisions and indictments at Asheville, N.C., he organized his "Christian Party" and announced his candidacy for the President of the United States--an office to which it will be seen Ballard himself has felt himself peculiarly fitted!

Three and a half years later, after many vicissitudes of fortune and after some months of search for him by the Dies committee, Pelley in the early part of 1940 appeared before that committee to answer certain charges allegedly to the effect that "he is a racketeer engaged in mulcting thousands of dollars annually from his fanatical and misled followers and credulous people all over the United States and Canada and certain foreign countries." (Associated Press Dispatch , Jan. 3, 1940.)

It is not within the scope of this book to consider whether the Dies committee was or was not justified in making the above allegations concerning Pelley. We desire merely to point out the startling parallel between these two movements and to show by actual evidence that so far as the Ballard movement is concerned the Dies committee, if it had gone into the matter, could have brought out justifiably, we believe, similar charges against Saint Germain's "Mighty I AM" movement.

We shall complete the parallel between the two movements by quoting Associated Press Dispatch of February 8, 1940, giving an account of Pelley's appearance before the Dies committee:

"With a trace of wistfulness, William Dudley Pelley, leader of the Silver Shirts, told the Dies committee today that if his organization had succeeded in its purposes, he 'probably' would be in charge of the government now.

"And in that case, he continued, he 'probably' would have put into effect something resembling Adolf Hitler's policies with respect to the Jews, although he said he does not endorse Hitler's exact methods."

It is this Pelley Silver Shirt movement which Guy and Edna Ballard were particularly interested in previous to the publication of Unveiled Mysteries, and, as will be shown, they tried to build a foundation upon Pelley's organization in an effort to launch their own Mighty I AM movement.

In order to show this Silver Shirt background of the Ballard movement we shall now have to refer to a certain meeting which was held in the summer of 1934 at the Ballard home on 84th Place, Chicago.

To this meeting was invited the treasurer of the Pelley organization, some additional Pelleyites, and others interested in metaphysical and patriotic movements. It was the first regular ten-day class ever held by the Ballards, and it is important because what transpired there indicates clearly the early efforts of their invisible "Saint Germain" to lay plans for a "New Government" in America which was to be formed more of less along the line previously described by Pelley in his writings.

Hitler in California

LATimes  |  Hitler didn’t have to set foot out of Germany for his malign plans to be felt beyond the Reich’s borders — even here in Los Angeles. Through the depths of the Depression right into World War II, Nazi Germany was ginning up support in Southern California, where its agents plotted everything from attacks on National Guard armories to murdering Hollywood’s Jewish moguls and filmmakers.

USC history professor Steven J. Ross has unearthed the story of sunshine Nazism, from picnic rallies in a La Crescenta park to a compound planned for Pacific Palisades as Hitler’s White House on the Pacific. Ross’ book, “Hitler in Los Angeles, How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots against Hollywood and America,” is part thriller and all chiller, about how close the California Reich came to succeeding.

The Silver Shirts Haven't Completely Disappeared

newyorker  |  Los Angeles’s Nazis and Fascists, some of whom were taking orders directly from Hitler and Goebbels, were preparing for what they saw as an inevitable Nazi take-over of the United States. Anticipating that day, Norman and Winona Stephens bought a fifty-acre piece of land above the Pacific Palisades, and started to build a fortress that would serve as Hitler’s West Coast White House, halfway between Tokyo and Berlin. “This was going to be the equivalent of San Clemente for Nixon, or Mar-a-Lago, only more convenient,” Ross said.

Another day, Ross hiked up a fire road leading toward the Nazi ruins. He found a gap in the fence, and began to descend a steep concrete staircase. “This is a lo-o-o-ng trip down,” he said.

Inside the compound, Ross led the way to a dazzling spray-painted building, the remains of a powerhouse. Catching sight of a “Fuck Trump” tag, he said, “Quite the opposite of Nazis!” The Stephenses, who spent some seventy million dollars in today’s money on the project, installed, in addition to generators, a huge water tank, a diesel fuel tank, and a meat locker, and erected a stable. Plans included meeting rooms, twenty-two bedrooms, and a pool: a luxurious and private place for Nazis to make war plans. “They were going to have a totally self-sustaining compound,” Ross said. Lewis’s spies warned him that there were Nazis in the hills, coaching sympathizers in marksmanship, urban warfare, and hand-to-hand combat. (Members of a clandestine Storm Trooper unit insisted that their militia-training exercises were a Sportabteilung, a club devoted to hiking and drilling for parades.)

“Hitler was hoping first to conquer more of Europe, and then turn his eyes to America,” Ross said. “If Japan had not bombed Pearl Harbor, we would have remained neutral a lot longer. The thinking was, by the time America woke up it would have been too late.” 

Why the Future Doesn't Need Us

ecosophia |  Let’s start with the concept of the division of labor. One of the great distinctions between a modern industrial society and other modes of human social organization is that in the former, very few activities are taken from beginning to end by the same person. A woman in a hunter-gatherer community, as she is getting ready for the autumn tuber-digging season, chooses a piece of wood, cuts it, shapes it into a digging stick, carefully hardens the business end in hot coals, and then puts it to work getting tubers out of the ground. Once she carries the tubers back to camp, what’s more, she’s far more likely than not to take part in cleaning them, roasting them, and sharing them out to the members of the band.

A woman in a modern industrial society who wants to have potatoes for dinner, by contrast, may do no more of the total labor involved in that process than sticking a package in the microwave. Even if she has potatoes growing in a container garden out back, say, and serves up potatoes she grew, harvested, and cooked herself, odds are she didn’t make the gardening tools, the cookware, or the stove she uses. That’s division of labor: the social process by which most members of an industrial society specialize in one or another narrow economic niche, and use the money they earn from their work in that niche to buy the products of other economic niches.

Let’s say it up front: there are huge advantages to the division of labor.  It’s more efficient in almost every sense, whether you’re measuring efficiency in terms of output per person per hour, skill level per dollar invested in education, or what have you. What’s more, when it’s combined with a social structure that isn’t too rigidly deterministic, it’s at least possible for people to find their way to occupational specialties for which they’re actually suited, and in which they will be more productive than otherwise. Yet it bears recalling that every good thing has its downsides, especially when it’s pushed to extremes, and the division of labor is no exception.

Crackpot realism is one of the downsides of the division of labor. It emerges reliably whenever two conditions are in effect. The first condition is that the task of choosing goals for an activity is assigned to one group of people and the task of finding means to achieve those goals is left to a different group of people. The second condition is that the first group needs to be enough higher in social status than the second group that members of the first group need pay no attention to the concerns of the second group.

Consider, as an example, the plight of a team of engineers tasked with designing a flying car.  People have been trying to do this for more than a century now, and the results are in: it’s a really dumb idea. It so happens that a great many of the engineering features that make a good car make a bad aircraft, and vice versa; for instance, an auto engine needs to be optimized for torque rather than speed, while an aircraft engine needs to be optimized for speed rather than torque. Thus every flying car ever built—and there have been plenty of them—performed just as poorly as a car as it did as a plane, and cost so much that for the same price you could buy a good car, a good airplane, and enough fuel to keep both of them running for a good long time.

Engineers know this. Still, if you’re an engineer and you’ve been hired by some clueless tech-industry godzillionaire who wants a flying car, you probably don’t have the option of telling your employer the truth about his pet project—that is, that no matter how much of his money he plows into the project, he’s going to get a clunker of a vehicle that won’t be any good at either of its two incompatible roles—because he’ll simply fire you and hire someone who will tell him what he wants to hear. Nor do you have the option of sitting him down and getting him to face what’s behind his own unexamined desires and expectations, so that he might notice that his fixation on having a flying car is an emotionally charged hangover from age eight, when he daydreamed about having one to help him cope with the miserable, bully-ridden public school system in which he was trapped for so many wretched years. So you devote your working hours to finding the most rational, scientific, and utilitarian means to accomplish a pointless, useless, and self-defeating end. That’s crackpot realism.

You can make a great party game out of identifying crackpot realism—try it sometime—but I’ll leave that to my more enterprising readers. What I want to talk about right now is one of the most glaring examples of crackpot realism in contemporary industrial society. Yes, we’re going to talk about space travel again.

Why We Want to Change the World?

medium |  Humans have always been a social, cooperative species. According to Oren Harman of The Chronicle of Higher Education, this trait may be what’s propelled us to the top of the food chain:

“Developing the biological and cultural mechanisms that suppressed disruptive within-group competition and fostered empathy and trust, our ancestors became the sole primate.”

Ridley, and other evolutionary biologists, theorize that humans are designed to pass on their genes. However, preserving oneself is not the only way to replicate one’s genes. Per the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “By behaving altruistically, an organism reduces the number of offspring it is likely to produce itself, but boosts the number that other organisms are likely to produce.”

David and Edward Wilson described the adaptive strategy behind this paradox more succinctly:

“Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups”

While altruism may be a cost to the individual, it comes with the benefit of increasing the likelihood that others with the group will survive. In other words, while altruism may not help us as individuals, it may help our kinsmen. Or, as Ridley says, “Selfish genes sometimes uses selfless individuals to achieve their ends.”

The power of reciprocity

Our ancestors cooperated on important functions such as hunting, gathering, protecting the tribe, and raiding others for their resources. This cooperation is helpful to the group and to the individuals within that group, writes Christopher Bergland of Psychology Today:

“Social behaviors — including altruism — are often genetically programmed into a species to help them survive…Even if you are feeling ‘selfish’, behaving selflessly may be the wisest ‘self-serving’ thing to do.”

Bergland explains the benefit to this strategy: “Acting selflessly in the moment provides a selective advantage to the altruist in the form of some kind of return benefit.” A paper published in the Annual Review of Psychology describes these reciprocal benefits more specifically: “Signaling that one is generous can lead to benefits for the person signaling, such as being chosen as an exchange partner, friend, or mate.”

If you help a friend pay of their credit card debt, they may be more likely to help you pay off your debt in the future. If you help a friend move into a new apartment, they’ll be more likely to help you when you move. When you are known as a person who helps others, people want to be your friend. By giving, we receive.

Trans-Turing Machines

bigsmartdata |  From the Poised Realm, the embodiment of Trans-Turing Systems, as a real invention, doth flow. Of course you are familiar with the Turing Machine: the theoretical paper tape compute engine to which all modern processors are obliged to worship every Sunday…you are, of course, familiar with the Turing Machine.

The Turing Machine

The work of Alan Turing is the rock from which the quest for a congruent theoretical computer science was launched. Totally awesome quantum computing heavy Scott Aaronson has written that when it comes to AI, we can divide everything that’s been said about it into two categories: the 70% that was covered in Turing’s 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and the remaining 30% that has followed in the decades since then. 

Turing Machine = Foundation of Computer Science 




So whoa — a Trans-Turing System? What?? I must know more!

That was the third thing that drove me to Tucson. I had to ask Kauffman what he meant — what he Tsaw, what he imagined. I found a description in the patent that Kauffman, et al, filed in 2014:

 58

"Further disclosed herein is a Trans-Turing machine that includes a plurality of nodes, each node comprising at least one quantum degree of freedom that is coupled to at least one quantum degree of freedom in another node and at least one classical degree of freedom that is coupled to at least one classical degree of freedom in another node, wherein the nodes are configured such that the quantum degrees of freedom decohere to classicity and thereby alter the classical degrees of freedom, which then alter the decoherence rate of remaining quantum degrees of freedom; at least one input signal generator configured to produce an input signal that recoheres classical degrees of freedom to quantum degrees of freedom; and a detector configured to receive quantum or classical output signals from the nodes."

Sweet. I got it. Quantum computing nodes working in tandem with classical compute (Turing Machine) systems and what emerges is a Trans-Turing Machine, not constrained nor otherwise entailed by a bothersome set of NP-complete limits. Polynomial hierarchy collapse ensues, at long last P = NP, and we are full throttle to ride warp drive engines to the stars! Maybe? Maybe. Maybe not.

I had to ask Kauffman.

After I spotted him at the outdoor mixer on Thursday night, after I got over my fanboy flutters, after I introduced myself, chatted with him for a bit about his new book and how much I liked it, after I explained my own thoughts from my field in computer science, and how his book from a decade and a half earlier had so deeply influenced me, I did finally ask. 

“So how do we build the Trans-Turnig Machine?”

A wry smile crossed his face. His eyes lit. For a moment he stopped being the intellectual giant I had come to revere, and revealed the mischievous, inquisitive, childlike spirit that must have driven him his entire life.

“I have no idea,” he said replied with a grin.

I was all satisfied. I knew he did not mean that he could not conceive of one, nor he did mean that he could not describe one, nor not define the attributes it might require, nor not imagine how it might function. What he meant was we still don’t know enough about quantum computing to imbue an instrument of our own creation with something akin to consciousness — whatever that means.

Today we all harvest the ample fruits from the first baby steps into the Network Age. We are still painting a digital patina over the planet. More stuff soon will think. We are clearly well into the age of pervasive computing, but computing is not yet ubiquitous, though soon it will be. Soon — within a decade — everything will be engineered to connect with everything, and almost all those systems are and will be awesome Turing Machines, programmable systems all, that will link us all together in a transcendent fine-grained meshed digital fabric of increasing value. Yet on the fringes, there is quantum computing, playfully peeking through from behind the classical physics curtain. And therein lies the unpredictable. It could be that Here There Be Monsters. Or not. That’s the beauty and the bizarre of where we are. Both terror and elation are on the rise, though neither are as appropriate nor as compelling as is the raw, robust curiosity that drives us ever forward.

Is the ineffable thing to come a D-Wave progeny? Maybe. Will Scott Aaronson explain and extend the exploding adjacent possible? Probably. Did Kauffman and Hameroff lead us to the brink? Absolutely. And from the wily Trans-Turing Machine, will Machine Consciousness one day emerge … whatever that means? 

I have no idea.

Poised Realm Patent

google | CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

• [0001]
  This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application Nos. 61/367,781, filed Jul. 26, 2010; 61/367,779, filed Jul. 26, 2010; 61/416,723, filed Nov. 23, 2010; 61/420,720, filed Dec. 7, 2010; and 61/431,420, filed Jan. 10, 2011, all of which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
BACKGROUND
• [0002]
  1. Field of the Invention
• [0003]
  The present invention relates to systems and uses of systems operating between fully quantum coherent and fully classical states. Non-limiting applications include drug discovery, computers, and artificial intelligence.
• [0004]
  2. Background Description
• [0005]
  Many physical systems having quantum degrees of freedom quickly decohere to classicity for all practical purposes. Thus, many designed systems consider only classical behaviors. One example is in the field of drug discovery where traditional approaches to drug design considers the lock-and-key fitting of a molecule into an enzyme or receptor. Other designed systems are carefully setup to maintain full quantum coherence, for example, the qubits in a quantum computer. However, recent discoveries have indicated several systems in nature that have relatively slow decoherence. Birds are able to see magnetic field lines due to a quantum coherent chemical reaction in their retina. Light harvesting molecules are able to maintain quantum coherent electron transport for times much longer than the expected coherence time at room temperatures. The existence of such cases demonstrates that quantum coherence can exist at room temperature and at the presence of water bath and evolution can ‘design’ quantum coherent structures to play certain biological roles. Thus, there is a need for new systems that utilize the unique properties that exist between full quantum coherence and classicity
  SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
  • [0006]
    Disclosed herein are various methods of classifying the state of a system, such as a molecule interacting with its environment, in terms of its degree of order, its degree of coherence, and/or its rate of coherence decay. Some embodiments include classifying only a single one of these variables whereas other embodiments include classifying two or all three of the variables. These methods include classifying the system in the course of creating systems that exist and/or operate at a specific point or region of a classification space described the variables discussed above and all practical outcomes of such creation.
  • [0007]
    Disclosed herein is a quantum reservoir computer that includes a plurality of nodes, each node comprising at least one quantum degree of freedom that is coupled to at least one quantum degree of freedom in each other node; at least one input signal generator configured to produce at least one time-varying input signal that couples to the quantum degree of freedom; and a detector configured to receive a plurality of time-varying output signals that couple to the quantum degree of freedom.
  • [0008]
    Also disclosed herein is a method of drug discovery that includes selecting a biological target; screening a library of candidate molecules to identify a first subset of candidate molecules that bind to the biological target; determining the energy level spacing distribution of a quantum degree of freedom in each of the candidate molecules in the first subset; comparing the energy level spacing distribution to at least one pre-determined reference function; and selecting a second subset of molecules from the first subset as drug candidates based on the comparison.

  • 0009]
    Further disclosed herein is a method of drug discovery that includes selecting a biological target; screening a library of candidate molecules to identify a first subset of candidate molecules that bind to the biological target; determining the energy level spacing distribution of a quantum degree of freedom in each of the candidate molecules in the first subset; conducting an in vitro or in vivo assay for biological activity on each of the candidate molecules in the first subset; correlating the energy level spacing distribution with activity determined from the in vitro or in vivo assay; determining the energy level spacing distributions of a quantum degree of freedom in a new set of candidate molecules; comparing the energy level spacing distributions of the new set of candidate molecules with energy level spacing distributions that correlate with biological activity; and select as drug candidates from the new set of candidate molecules those molecules whose energy level spacing distributions exhibit a pre-determined level of similarity to the energy level spacing distributions that correlate with biological activity.
  • [0010]
    Further disclosed herein is a method of drug discovery that includes selecting a biological target; screening a library of candidate molecules to identify a first subset of candidate molecules that bind to the biological target; measuring decoherence decay of a quantum degree of freedom in each of the candidate molecules in the first subset; comparing the decoherence decay to at least one pre-determined reference function; and selecting a second subset of molecules from the first subset as drug candidates based on the comparison.

Quantum Neural Nets - Branes - Self-Organizing Automata...,

Going on two years now since the America2.0 list shut down, and I stopped imbibing the high strangeness emanating from the Energy Scholar.

PQHR | I'd like to toss in my two cents about extra-terrestrial life.  Personally I completely agree with Nate Hagens:  "Mathematically almost a certainty. Whether they could ever have technology to reach earth, extremely unlikely. Whether they have been on earth in secret impacting things, people, probably sillier than chem-trails. My 2cents. Jays list"

That said, I wish to toss out a weirdness or three related to 'extraterrestrial life' and it's possible historical discovery some years ago.  

*** Warning, this is very long, and arguably does not belong on this list at all. Casual readers might consider stopping here ***

I (Bruce Stephenson) have no demonstrable evidence on this one.  In the past decade-plus I've been able to verify some of the topics below, but not others.  The bit about extra-terrestrial 'life' I've not been able to verify. So please consider it nonsense until evidence arises to the contrary.

Since I've not verified the second part of this story, and thus have no idea of its truth or correctness, I'll tell the whole thing as if it were Science Fiction.  It probably is.  Part one is pretty solid and largely verified in multiple independent ways, which took me many years of effort performing both research and field operations.  Part two is totally unverified and might be complete nonsense.  Just treat the whole thing as Speculative Science Fiction and you won't go wrong.

The following is an excerpt from Bruce Stephenson's story titled The Layperson's Guide to Quantum Neural Network Technology, subtitled It is Easier to get Forgiveness than Permission , paraphrased by the author for this America 2.0 Group.  

Part One: In the 1990s certain scientists working on a Five Eyes project via DARPA discovered a new General Purpose Technology.  This author calls the project Ultra II, for it's remarkable resemblance to the WW2 project Ultra, but no one else uses this moniker.  This new technology was generated via Synthetic Biology techniques that leverage a special-case (two dimensional) solution to Mathematical Biology's Biogenesis problem.  See the published work of Stephen Wolfram and Stuart Kauffman for insight about how this might have been accomplished.  This new technology is best described as a form of teleportation-based nanotechnology that behaves like a Quantum Neural Network. It can only exist as a physical (and thus informational) system within a 2DEG environment, thanks to the wonky mathematics surrounding two-dimensional particle Physics. This new base technology was used to construct a winner-take-all style topological quantum neural network intended as the basis for a code-breaking supercomputer.   While this 'system of nanoparticles' is not 'alive' in the Carbon-based biological sense, it has many characteristics of being 'alive'.  Whether or not one considers it 'alive' depends largely upon how loosely one defines the word 'alive'.  Physicists call this sort of artifact a brane, punning both brain and membrane.

This form of nanotechnology can only exist in two dimensions, specifically within a Two Dimensional Electron Gas.  2DEGs exist on and and around earth in several forms:  humans have manufactured tens of billions of 2DEG environments in the form of MOSFETs, mostly since 1998; also, the Earth's Magnetopause has elements of a 2DEG, albeit a messy one.  This type of nanotechnology can replicate either within its current 2DEG environment or, with training, into another 2DEG environment reachable by  a 'spore'.  Once a 2DEG is 'filled' with these nanotech 'entities' the medium is said to be 'enlightened' and forms a single 'node' of the distributed super-entity.  Leastwise, that's the terminology used by the scientists in question in personal communication.  

This weird complex system is totally unlike a computer, yet it its creators needed to somehow shoe-horn it into something compatible with a computer.  They trained it to generate an 'interface' logically modeled on the Unix operating system.  This gave them a logical platform on which to operate.  I guess that Bill Joy may have contributed to this part of the process, given his area of expertise and his previous publicly acknowledged work for DARPA on Unix, but that's just my guess.  Most of the logical functions this system could perform were just things an ordinary computer could do, but the underlying physical system's basis in quantum teleportation also made it a type of quantum computer. 

The Brookings Report

wikipedia |  Although the report discusses the need for research on many policy issues related to space exploration, it is most often cited for passages from its brief section on the implications of a discovery of extraterrestrial life.^{[citation needed]}

The report touches on the possibility of covering up extraterrestrial life, including the following passages:

"While face-to-face meetings with it will not occur within the next twenty years (unless its technology is more advanced than ours, qualifying it to visit Earth), artifacts left at some point in time by these life forms might possibly be discovered through our space activities on the Moon, Mars, or Venus." – pages 182–183^[2]

"Anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they have had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behavior." – page 183

"Since intelligent life might be discovered at any time via the radio telescope research presently under way, and since the consequences of such a discovery are presently unpredictable because of our limited knowledge of behavior under even an approximation of such dramatic circumstances, two research areas can be recommended:

Continuing studies to determine emotional and intellectual understanding and attitudes -- and successive alterations of them if any -- regarding the possibility and consequences of discovering intelligent extraterrestrial life.

Historical and empirical studies of the behavior of peoples and their leaders when confronted with dramatic and unfamiliar events or social pressures. Such studies might help to provide programs for meeting and adjusting to the implications of such a discovery. Questions one might wish to answer by such studies would include: How might such information, under what circumstances, be presented to or withheld from the public for what ends? What might be the role of the discovering scientists and other decision makers regarding release of the fact of discovery?" – pages 183–184

"An individual's reactions to such a radio contact would in part depend on his cultural, religious, and social background, as well as on the actions of those he considered authorities and leaders, and their behavior, in turn, would in part depend on their cultural, social, and religious environment. The discovery would certainly be front-page news everywhere; the degree of political or social repercussion would probably depend on leadership's interpretation of (1) its own role, (2) threats to that role, and (3) national and personal opportunities to take advantage of the disruption or reinforcement of the attitudes and values of others. Since leadership itself might have great need to gauge the direction and intensity of public attitudes, to strengthen its own morale and for decision making purposes, it would be most advantageous to have more to go on than personal opinions about the opinions of the public and other leadership groups." – page 183

"The knowledge that life existed in other parts of the universe might lead to a greater unity of men on Earth, based on the 'oneness' of man or on the age-old assumption that any stranger is threatening. Much would depend on what, if anything, was communicated between man and the other beings . . ." – page 183

"The positions of the major American religious denominations, the Christian sects, and the Eastern religions on the matter of extraterrestrial life need elucidation. Consider the following: 'The Fundamentalist (and anti-science) sects are growing apace around the world . . . For them, the discovery of other life -- rather than any other space product -- would be electrifying. . . . some scattered studies need to be made both in their home centers and churches and their missions, in relation to attitudes about space activities and extraterrestrial life.'" – page 102, n.34^[3]

"If plant life or some subhuman intelligence were found on Mars or Venus, for example, there is on the face of it no good reason to suppose these discoveries, after the original novelty had been exploited to the fullest and worn off, would result in substantial changes in perspectives or philosophy in large parts of the American public, at least any more than, let us say, did the discovery of the coelacanth or the panda." – page 103, n.34

"If super intelligence is discovered, the results become quite unpredictable. It is possible that if the intelligence of these creatures were sufficiently superior to ours, they would choose to have little if any contact with us. On the face of it, there is no reason to believe that we might learn a great deal from them, especially if their physiology and psychology were substantially different from ours."– page 103, n.34

"It has been speculated that, of all groups, scientists and engineers might be the most devastated by the discovery of relatively superior creatures, since these professions are most clearly associated with the mastery of nature, rather than with the understanding and expression of man. Advanced understanding of nature might vitiate all our theories at the very least, if not also require a culture and perhaps a brain inaccessible to Earth scientists." – page 103, n.34

"It is perhaps interesting to note that when asked what the consequences of the discovery of superior life would be, an audience of Saturday Review readership chose, for the most part, not to answer the question at all, in spite of their detailed answers to many other speculative questions." – page 103, n.34

"A possible but not completely satisfactory means for making the possibility 'real' for many people would be to confront them with present speculations about the I.Q. of the porpoise and to encourage them to expand on the implications of this situation." – page 105, n.36

"Such studies would include historical reactions to hoaxes, psychic manifestations, unidentified flying objects, etc. Hadley Cantril's study, Invasion from Mars (Princeton University Press, 1940), would provide a useful if limited guide in this area. Fruitful understanding might be gained from a comparative study of factors affecting the responses of primitive societies to exposure to technologically advanced societies. Some thrived, some endured, and some died." – page 105, n.37

Concepts in Kron's Later Papers....,

stackexchange |  Gabriel Kron was an important research electrical engineer known for applying differential geometry and algebraic topology to the study of electrical system. Towards the end of his career he published a number of unusual, even by his standards, papers on concepts with names like polyhedral networks, self organizing automata, wave automata, multidimensional space filters and crystal computer, which I think are more or less synonymous. I have obtained a few of these papers and did not understand them at all. If they were not written be Kron, I would be suspicious of them.

I have not been able to find any significant secondary literature on these ideas. The few citations I have tracked down only mention them tangentially, but I have also found no refutations of these papers and no suggestions that Kron had gone off the rails. The papers were published in respectable journals.

I am looking for an understandable exposition or refutation of these ideas, or pointers to such. Also pointers to follow on research by others, possibly using different terminology.

I am not looking for explanations of Kron's other ideas like diakoptics and tensor analysis of networks.

Some of the relevant papers are:

• G. Kron, Multi-dimensional space filters. Matrix and Tensor Quarterly, 9, 40 - 43 (1958).
• G. Kron, Basic concepts of multi-dimensional space filters. AIEE Transactions, 78, 554 - 561 (1959).
• G. Kron, Self-organizing, dynamo-type automata. Matrix and Tensor Quarterly, 11, 42 - 52 (1960).
• G. Kron, Power-system type self-organizing automata. RAAG Memoirs, III, 392 - 417 (1962).
• G. Kron, Multi-dimensional curve-fitting with self-organizing automata. Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, 5, 46 - 49 (1962).

I have mainly looked at the last one and material at the end of

• Diakoptics; the piecewise solution of large-scale systems. MacDonald, London, 1963. 166 pp.

Gabriel Kron: Negative Resistance

cheniere |  At the time of his death, Gabriel Kron was arguably the greatest electrical scientist ever produced by the United States.

It appears that the availability of this Heaviside energy component surrounding any portion of the circuit may be the long sought secret to Gabriel Kron's “open path” that enabled him to produce a true negative resistor in the 1930s, as the chief scientist for General Electric on the U.S. Navy contract for the Network Analyzer at Stanford University.  Kron was never permitted to release how he made his negative resistor, but did state that, when placed in the Network Analyzer, the generator could be disconnected because the negative resistor would power the circuit.  Since a negative resistor converges surrounding energy and diverges it into the circuit, it appears that Kron's negative resistor gathered energy from the Heaviside component of energy flow as an “open path” flow of energy — connecting together the local vicinities of any two separated circuit components — that had been discarded by previous electrodynamicists following Lorentz.  Hence Kron referred to it as the “open path.”  Particularly see Gabriel Kron, “The frustrating search for a geometrical model of electrodynamic networks,” circa 1962.  We quote:

“...the missing concept of "open-paths" (the dual of "closed-paths") was discovered, in which currents could be made to flow in branches that lie between any set of two nodes.  (Previously — following Maxwell — engineers tied all of their open-paths to a single datum point, the 'ground').  That discovery of open-paths established a second rectangular transformation matrix... which created 'lamellar' currents...” 
“A network with the simultaneous presence of both closed and open paths was the answer to the author's years-long search.”

A true negative resistor appears to have been developed by the renowned Gabriel Kron, who was never permitted to reveal its construction or specifically reveal its development.  For an oblique statement of his negative resistor success, see Gabriel Kron, “Numerical solution of ordinary and partial differential equations by means of equivalent circuits,” Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 16, Mar. 1945a, p. 173.  Quoting:

“When only positive and negative real numbers exist, it is customary to replace a positive resistance by an inductance and a negative resistance by a capacitor (since none or only a few negative resistances exist on practical network analyzers).” 

Apparently Kron was required to insert the words “none or” in that statement.  See also Gabriel Kron, “Electric circuit models of the Schrödinger equation,” Phys. Rev. 67(1-2), Jan. 1 and 15, 1945, p. 39.  We quote:

“Although negative resistances are available for use with a network analyzer,…”. 

Here the introductory clause states in rather certain terms that negative resistors were available for use on the network analyzer, and Kron slipped this one through the censors.  It may be of interest that Kron was a mentor of Sweet, who was his protégé.  Sweet worked for the same company, but not on the Network Analyzer project.  However, he almost certainly  knew the secret of Kron's “open path” discovery and his negative resistor.

---

Pooh-poohing the Kron negative resistor is just sheer naïveté.  Kron was one of the greatest electrical scientists of all time, and applied full general relativity to rotating machines, electrical circuits and generators, etc. 

Simply go check his papers in the literature.  Even today, there are few electrodynamicists really able to fully comprehend his advanced work.  And his direct quotations from his own published technical papers in the literature leave no doubt he had made a negative resistor.  Further, other scientists have commented on Kron's discovery of the “open path” connecting any two points in a circuit, and usable to provide energy transfer at will.

The mechanism by which he did this is what Kron was never allowed to reveal.

Gabriel Kron: Tensor Analysis of Rotating Electrical Machinery

wikipedia |  Gabriel Kron (1901 – 1968) was a Hungarian American electrical engineer who promoted the use of methods of linear algebra, multilinear algebra, and differential geometry in the field. His method of system decomposition and solution called Diakoptics is still influential today. Though he published widely, his methods were slow to be assimilated. At Union College a symposium was organized by Schaffer Library on "Gabriel Kron, the Man and His Work", held October 14, 1969. H.H. Happ edited the contributed papers, which were published by Union College Press as Gabriel Kron and Systems Theory

quantumchemistryhistory  |  Gabriel Kron, a very fascinating man. What I could do with the history of Gabriel Kron. He was thrown out of the University of Michigan. I'll tell you a little bit about him that's not in my book; I did something else. He was thrown out of the University of Michigan because he was always fighting with the instructors, at something like sixteen. He decided to work his way around the world, and came to Hollywood. He was very brilliant. He had so many problems because his professors were a couple of light years behind him. He got back to Hollywood, signed a contract for $10,000 or so to work on his new experimental movie camera, and the company that gave him the contract paid him the money up front and went bankrupt. So he had a year or two with no work to do. He came to New York City. In the public library he started to read books on mathematics and became the inventor of something called tensor analysis. It became quite important but then he worked for GE. He was unusual and was not easy to work with because he was ahead of his time. You have to mention him in the history of electrical engineering because he was a character....

Book listing (no ad) taken from alibris.com 8/2003.

Yet another reference to G. Kron, 8/2003, - from here
.....
Andrei Petrov described Kuznetsov's work on the method of tensor analysis for the handling of physical systems of extreme complexity, based on earlier work by the American engineer Gabriel Kron, whom Kuznetsov held in high esteem. Petrov also recounted the origin of the discovery of the significance of what Kuznetsov called the "Principle of Conservation of Power," for the understanding of living systems as well as physical economies, whose evolution proceeds in the opposite direction as that implied by the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics. ...

Also: Gabriel Kron. Tensors for Circuits. Dover Publication, Inc., second Edition, 1959.

Some other links:
http://www-ec.njit.edu/civil/fabric/automated/CH9.pdf