Quantum Teleportation

Quantum teleportation involves the exchange of information in the form of quantum states, not matter, between two points with the use of quantum entanglement. In principle, the distances can be arbitrarily long and works even if the location of the recipient is not known.  Cryptography is a key element in quantum communications and quantum computers. It takes advantage of quantum entanglement, the phenomenon in which two objects, such as photons, are connected in such a way, even at great distances, that changing the state of one instantly changes the state of the other. If an eavesdropper intercepts the message, this entangled state is disrupted and the aggression is thus noticed.

The latest article in a recent series of breakthroughs in quantum teleportation involves researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute who have reported in Nature Physics (1) that they have succeeded in teleporting information between two clouds of gas atoms, and they have done so every single time they attempted. The experiment involves two glass containers, each containing caesium gas atoms. Information is teleported from one glass container to the other by means of a laser beam of light which becomes entangled with the gas atoms. Even though the glass containers were only a half meter apart, it “is entirely due to the size of the laboratory,” explains Eugene Polzik. “We could increase the range if we had the space and, in principle, we could teleport information, for example, to a satellite.” (2)

Anton Zeilinger’s group in Vienna have succeeded in teleporting information over long distances. In a paper in Nature in 2012 (3), an international team led by Zeilinger reported successfully transmitting quantum states over a distance of 143 kilometers, between two Canary Islands.

Evolution In Action

In a paper in the May 30 issue of Current Biology, (1,2) researchers have been able to solve a problem that has perplexed biologists for over two centuries: the evolution of the turtle shell. They have been able to fill what they deem a 35 to 50 million year gap by the study of an extinct South African reptile known as Eunotosaurus africanus. In doing so, they have given us a very good example of evolution in action.

According to the author, Tyler Larson, the turtle shell is a structure whose evolution started over 260 million years ago in the Permian period. The shell is actually composed of approximately 50 bones, the fusion of ribs and vertebrae, the only animals that have evolved their shell in this way. Other animals with shells use bony scales as a protective shell and retain their ribs in order to allow for the mechanics of breathing. The turtles have apparently solved this problem by the evolution of a muscular sling.

Eunotosaurus displays several characteristics—such as a reduced number of elongated trunk vertebrae and reorganization of respiratory muscles to the ventral side of the ribs, among others—which conform to predictions that the initial transformations occurred by the Middle Permian period. The known turtle fossils discovered until recently dated back about 215 million years and had fully developed shells. In 2008 the discovery of Odontochelys semitestacea, a reptile about 220 million years old, showed that it had a fully developed plastron, the belly side of the shell, but only a partial carapace. Eunotosaurus is 40 million years older and it has the broadened ribs and lack of intercostal muscles running between its ribs that are found only in turtles, but lacks broad spines on their vertebrae and other features common to turtles and Odontochelys.

DNA Computing: Is It Here Yet?

In 1994, Leonard Adleman, a computer scientist at University of Southern California, introduced the concept of DNA based computing in a paper in the journal Science. (1) He used DNA strands to solve the well-known traveling salesman problem (given a number of cities, what is the shortest route for a salesman to take without going to any city more than once?) The entire process took days and required a lot of human intervention. Since then logic gates, essential elements of any computer, have been created using DNA code with a variety of approaches. The circuits can solve simple mathematical problems, recognize patterns, play games and even detect disease states inside a cell.

All modern computers have three basic functions: storing, transmitting and performing logical operations. In 2012, Endy et al. made the headlines by announcing the development of the first two of those functions for DNA computers. (2) Now they announced the last component, that of computation.

In a paper published March 28, 2013 in Science (3) a team of Stanford University bioengineers led by Endy describe a biological transistor made from DNA and RNA which they named a “transcriptor.” This transcriptor uses proteins called integrases to digitally control the flow of RNA polymerase along a strand of DNA, analogous to the flow of electrons along a circuit in electronic transistors. Using these transcriptors, the team has created “logic gates” that can function inside a living cell.

A Mathematical Model for Evolution

One of the fundamental criticisms of the theory of evolution has been that it lacks a mathematical basis. From its inception evolution has used qualitative concepts such as “random mutations” and “natural selection” to describe how genes can spontaneously mutate and cause the organism to be more adaptive to its environment, thus giving it an advantage in the number and “fitness” of its offspring. Now that may be changing.

A team of scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, led by Professor Wang, has published a paper that examines evolutionary dynamics from a mathematical perspective. (1,2) The study uses mathematical formulas to describe a new theory of evolution in which two forces are at play: an underlying emergent 3-D “fitness” landscape and an evolutionary force called “curl flux” which causes individuals and species to move through the fitness landscape in a spiraling manner. The hypothesis envisions endless co-evolution between individuals within species or between two different species by movement through the fitness landscape via curl flux. The curl flux can be created by interactions between individuals of different species which can result in continuous and endless co-evolution, a version of the Red Queen Hypothesis.

How Many Universes Are There In a Multiverse?

Andrei Linde is Professor of Physics at Stanford University and the author of several important theories, including the inflationary universe theory, the inflationary multiverse theory and the theory of eternal inflation. These theories taken together envisage a multiverse with an eternally growing fractal structure in which universes continuously arise, with different laws of low energy physics operating in each of them.

In a 2009 paper (1) Linde and Vanchurin attempted to calculate how many universes there are in a multiverse. The initial calculation came to 10^10^10^7, a very large number and one which they admit could be wrong by many orders of magnitude. But they quickly point out that a multiverse has no meaning without an observer, if correctly viewed by quantum physics. 

“One of the implications of this result is that one can talk about the evolution of the universe only with respect to an observer. In the limit when the mass of the observer vanishes, the rest of the universe freezes in time. In this sense, the number of distinct observable histories of the universe is bounded from above by the total number of histories that can be recorded by a given observer. And this number is finite.”

Their calculation takes into account the total amount of information that can possibly be absorbed by a human brain during its lifetime, which they deem to be about 10^16 bits, “which means that a typical human brain can have about 10^10^16 different configurations, which means that a human observer may distinguish no more than 10^10^16 different universes.” From this number they hope to calculate the probability of a universe in which the laws of physics would allow intelligent life to evolve, the so-called anthropic principle.

So how many parallel universes are there in a multiverse? As many as your brain can fathom.

1.     How Many Universes Are In a Multiverse? Andrei Linde and Vitali Vanchurin, Dept. of Physics, Stanford University, 2009 

Quantum Physicists, Consciousness, God

With the introduction of relativity theory and quantum mechanics Newton’s mechanical view of the universe came to an end. Instead of the classical deterministic view of existence now developed an image of a universe that exists as a set of possible outcomes, a probability distribution. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that one cannot know both the exact position of a particle and its momentum at the same time. This led to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics which states that an object acts as both a wave and a particle in a set of probability waves. The act of measurement by an observer causes the “collapse” of a set of possibilities into one randomly chosen one which becomes physical “reality.”

The question of what constitutes an observer has plagued quantum mechanics from the beginning. Schrödinger' cat experiment in which a cat in a box can be both alive and dead at the same time (a quantum superposition) until an observer opens the box was complicated by the realization that the observer may also be in a quantum superposition and would require yet another observer and so on ad infinitum. If the entire universe is a quantum universe then there needs to be an ultimate consciousness outside of the universe to bring it into existence.

How Many Scientists Believe in God?

The question "Do you believe in God?" has a different meaning for each individual. God can be a personal God, a God of a specific religion, a God who created the universe and its laws but who did nothing after that, and so on. Let’s begin with statistics asking the question, "Do you believe in a personal God?"

The US psychologist James H. Leuba in his survey of 1914 found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected US scientists expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of a personal God. This figure rose to nearly 70% among the 400 "greater" scientists within his sample (1). Leuba repeated his survey 20 years later and found that these percentages among “greater” scientists had increased to 85%. (2). In 1998 Larson and Witham repeated Leuba’s study, using the term “greater” scientists to mean those who are members of the National Academy of Science. The results are shown in

Your Thoughts?

Let me know what you think about the first chapter of this scientific thriller,  'The Daedalus Project'. All comments are very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Bill.

The Chaotic Paths of Evolution

Evolutionary Paths. In a paper published in the November 2012 issue of BioScience (1) researchers led by Shozo Yokoyama at Emory University have labeled “highly questionable” assumptions relied upon to study the evolution of protein molecules. One of these assumptions is that changing a particular gene in a known location would affect the properties of ancestral and modern protein forms in the same way. That assumption allows computers to infer likely evolutionary paths leading to the forms of proteins found in modern organisms.

Doubts on Molecular Adaption. In experiments designed to test these assumptions, Yokoyama created hypothesized ancestral visual pigments and variants of them that might have been produced by mutation. What he found was that properties of related version of proteins often changed in different ways when the same mutation was introduced in each. This caused standard computational and statistical methods to rarely be able to identify the experimentally supported evolutionary pathway. Yokoyama concludes that his studies cast “serious doubt” on the “fundamental principles of molecular adaptation” used in thousands of papers.

No Going Back. In a related article (2), a University of Oregon team found that evolution can never go backwards. The team reconstructed the gene for a glucocorticoid receptor in the version that existed more than 400 million years ago. They found that over a rapid period of time, random mutations in other proteins caused changes in the protein’s structure which made it incompatible with the receptor’s primordial form. In other words, there is evolutionary bridge burning, which implies that the direction evolution took may be neither ideal nor inevitable.

Mind and Cosmos

In his new book, Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel, an atheist and professor of philosophy at New York University, joins a growing number of other philosophers and scientists in challenging evolution, albeit without offering an alternative.

Nagel’s argument is with reductive materialism, the idea that atoms and molecules and physical laws can explain everything in biology, including evolution. As pointed out in several reviews (e.g. NY Times) his knowledge of biology and evolution is superficial and, at times, outdated. As he readily admits, his discussion “is just the opinion of a layman.” But in his layman's opinion evolution is counterintuitive, it “flies in the face of common sense.” It doesn’t seem to occur to him that if that were the basis of scientific research, quantum theory, the most counterintuitive area of physics, would never have been accepted, despite the overwhelming evidence that it accurately describes reality as we know it.

Consciousness? Despite the false starts, Nagel’s argument eventually turns to more solid footing, that of consciousness. As he argued in his influential paper in the 1970s "What Is It Like To Be a Bat?" the experience a bat feels in its own mind is not knowable by simply knowing the chemistry of its brain. Nagel doubts that mind and consciousness could ever be explained by a materialistic description. Since Neo-Darwinian evolution is based on materialism, it can never explain mind and consciousness. Despite efforts to describe consciousness by invoking brain function, biologists have had a very difficult time in even defining consciousness.

The Universe We Created

John Wheeler (1911-2008) was an eminent physicist, dreamer, colleague of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, mentor to many of today’s most eminent physicists, and the coiner of such terms as black hole, quantum foam, and wormhole. And he is also the creator of an intriguing thought experiment in quantum physics which may mean that we are the creators of our own universe.

One of the main tenets of quantum mechanics is that our observation of the universe directly affects its properties and behavior. In the traditional double slit experiment, the way one observes a photon, for example, determines whether the photon travels like a wave or a particle.

Delayed Choice Experiment
Wheeler’s thought experiment, called the delayed choice experiment, took it one step further. What if one makes the decision of whether or not to observe the photon at the last moment, after the photon has already passed a certain point and “has already made its decision” of whether it will be a particle or a wave? Wheeler proposed this thought experiment on a grand scale by proposing that we observe light from a quasar, light which has been traveling for billions of years long before there were any humans to observe it. The measurements made now, according to Wheeler, would determine the photon’s past.

Sequestration

It has been an accepted fact that basic research is something that only government can invest in and promote on a large scale since private industry needs commercial payoff relatively quickly. Our leadership in the world has depended on government investment in basic research. Today, however, the NIH budget stands at a woefully low level.

Lowest Investment
In constant dollars adjusted for inflation, the NIH budget in fiscal year 2012 is $4 billion less than it was in 2003 and is at the lowest level since 2001. The number of research grants funded by NIH has declined since 2004. In 2012 NIH funded 3,100 fewer grants than in 2004.