Brain Physiology, Cognition and Consciousness: notice board entry
This is a public group
Quantum Cognition Sites
- Posted by:
- Alfredo Pereira Jr (group admin)
- Date:
- 23 February 2008
- Comments:
- 2 comments
Dear All:
For those who are interested in the relation of quantum theory, biology and cognition, here are some sites:
a) Quantumbionet This site and the journal Quantum Biosystems are accepting new corraborators/submissions (please check the letter below);
b) Stuart Hameroff’s Quantum Consciousness
c) The journal Neuroquantology
d) Brazilian electronic journal ‘Informação e Cognição’, where I organized a number on Quantum Cognition.
Best Regards,
Alfredo
FORWARDED LETTER:
Dear QBN member
I am launching the international campaign “revitalizing the Quantumbionet”
During the first year of life the Quantumbionet has growing in interests and new outstanding members joint the network.
Our activities are still low but with the cooperation of everybody some new interesting things will be done.
You can rivitalize the network simply by inviting a new member you consider
of value for the quantumbionet
Another useful action should be a suggestion to improve the activities of
the QBN
The 2nd quantumbionet workshop will be organized this year
The Quantum Biosystems Journal should be revitalize either by submitting a
paper or a review
I hope to have a feedback from each of you
With best regards
Prof. Massimo Pregnolato
Another excellent site is Quantum-Mind
Best
Alfredo
Thanks for these updates. In case anyone missed them, here are a few recent developments:
“How birds use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate has puzzled researchers for decades. In recent years, a growing body of evidence has pointed to the possibility that a weak magnetic field can influence the outcome of a certain type of chemical reaction involving the recombination of pairs of ions in bird retinas. The trouble is that the ion recombination is known to happen too quickly for the Earth’s weak magnetic field to have any effect. Now it looks as if the quantum Zeno effect explains all, says one researcher (abstract). This is the watched-pot-never-boils effect in which the act of observing a quantum system maintains it for longer than expected. That’s extraordinary news because it means a quantum sensor is determining the macroscopic behavior of living birds.”
physics arXiv blog
Were one inclined to be a bit snarky, one might point out that eyes regularly capture photons, which would seem to qualify those organs as “quantum sensors.”
Early quantum theorists treated the quantum–classical transition almost as a kind of sleight of hand, something that had to be imposed on quantum mechanics to recover the familiar world. Now, however, there are strong signs that the transition can be understood as something that emerges quite naturally and inevitably from quantum theory. If that’s so, it implies that ‘classicality’ is at root simply another quantum phenomenon. “There’s good reason to believe that we are just as much part of the quantum world as are the tiny atoms and electrons that sparked quantum theory in the first place,” says quantum theorist Maximilian Schlosshauer of the University of Melbourne in Australia.
Testing the new description of the quantum–classical transition involves experiments on systems ranging from photons to superconductors to microscopic vibrating beams. These efforts pose an extreme challenge to experimentalists, as they involve looking for very small effects on comparatively big things — rather like trying to detect the sag when a fly lands on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. The effects very quickly get so small that many physicists believe it is absurd to try to see them. “One crowd says: ‘Of course it will work — quantum mechanics says so’,” says Schwab. “The other says: ‘There’s no way it will work — these guys are nuts’.”
Nature
Again, one might point out that Dyson addressed this topic over 50 years ago:
Physicists talk about two kinds of fields: classical fields and quantum fields. Actually, we believe that all fields in nature are quantum fields. A classical field is just a special large-scale manifestation of a quantum field.
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There is nothing else except these fields: the whole of the material universe is built of them.
Dyson, Freeman J., “Field Theory”, pp. 58-60, Scientific American, 188: 1953.