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Honeybees are found to interact with quantum fields
- jrnkntl 18y agoGolden ratio, quantum mechanics... Those bees are quite sophisticated. BTW: *.box.sk == old school
- tdavis 18y agoTell me you remember the timeless astalavista.box.sk ...
- davidw 18y agoInteresting article, but the headline is a bit misleading: "At this point Shipman departs from safely grounded scholarship and enters instead the airy realm of speculation. The flag manifold, she notes, in addition to providing mathematicians with pure joy, also happens to be useful to physicists in solving some of the mathematical problems that arise in dealing with quarks, tiny particles that are the building blocks of protons and neutrons. And she does not believe the manifold's presence both in the mathematics of quarks and in the dance of honeybees is a coincidence. Rather she suspects that the bees are somehow sensitive to what's going on in the quantum world of quarks, that quantum mechanics is as important to their perception of the world as sight, sound, and smell."
- randomwalker 18y agoHorrible headline. The part of the article that talks about quantum mumbo-jumbo is prefaced with this: "At this point Shipman departs from safely grounded scholarship and enters instead the airy realm of speculation." It also says, "But she tends not to have much professional company when she reveals what she thinks is responsible for the bees' response." I'd be happy to put money down that this turns out to be bunk. Not that I know anything more than the person making these claims, but purely informed by history. Many, many scientists (including most famously Roger Penrose) have claimed that quantum phenomena exist in the biological world. None of these claims have been proven.
- ars 18y agoNo kidding. The first part, and even the alpha sounds cool, but the quantum part is bunk. She seems to have skipped chemistry: what physical mechanism can a bee use to detect these fields? After all they are made of proteins. What chemical mechanism would do it? Plus saying "detect quantum fields" is meaningless anyway. There is no such thing, it's a mathematical abstract, it's not an actual thing. There are many kinds of fields, saying quantum field gives some information about the type (for example that it's discontinuous), but it's not a specific field.
- ionfish 18y agoActually, there are some interpretations of quantum mechanics under which the wavefunction is an "actual thing", for example De Broglie's pilot-wave theory and Bohm's developments of it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohm_interpretation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohm_interpretation
- dhimes 18y agoThe other way to think about it is we all interact with quantum fields all the time. A photon is a quantum field. Interacting with electric, magnetic, or an other force is interacting with a quantum field. Nothing new there. [/Disclaimer: I read the comments above and declined to read the article. ]
- david927 18y agoExactly. The idea that bees could somehow be experiencing a six-dimensional manifold doesn't seem crazy to me.
- Retric 18y agoBee's have a ~million neurons and they have a simple language etc. Now you might assume they think like we do and then say "there brains are to tiny to do that" and then go off on a tangent. However, building a neural net with 50k neurons would let them do complex calculations without understanding them. They don't need to "think", flap wing, flap wing, flap wing, flap wing to fly just have a few cells which pulse every few fractions of a second and it works. So, the calculation of a six fold manifold might be going on in their tiny brains but it's not thought just raw math. Evolving systems don't need to produce maintainable code they just need to work. The idea that our brains can get our eyes to work and walking works etc but bee's can't do calculations is silly. They don't need to understand what's going on just simulate something that works.
- nazgulnarsil 18y agobox.sk found to interact with nut jobs
- gojomo 18y agoAwful headline, and article could benefit from an editor and some pictures of the dances/projections described. But, the similarity between bee dances and smaller-dimension projections of 6-dimensional shapes is very interesting... it bees have evolved an efficient storage/communication format for their path data. And yet, what are the 6 dimensions? 3 for coordinates in space; 1 for time, then... ? Magnetic field strength? Environmental scent gradients? Oh, I know! Just like ants leave chemical trails, bees would like to do the same. But in the air, chemicals would blow away.... in our universe. So they use their wings as tiny oscillation overthrusters and leave a stigmergic trail in the 8th dimension. Someone tell Dr. Banzai, and watch out for lectroids.
- snorkel 18y agoGiven what's already known of the bee dance I suspect it's all about radial vectors: Angle of the sun to the hive Angle of the hive to the food Distance to the food Angle of horizon to food (height) Angle of up (gravity) Angle of magnetic north
- StrawberryFrog 18y agoSigh. What the article claims is that the structure of bee dances are like the structure of the maths used in quantum physics. So what? bee brains could have neural nets that produce similar output as the quantum physics models. Correlation is not causation - that's an elementary mistake. And I'm still not sure what a "quantum field" is. The probability of an electron being present? We all interact with those when we press up against you know, matter.
- sh1mmer 18y agobee brains could have neural nets that produce similar output as the quantum physics models I think that's the point of the article. Bee brains couldn't with only a few million neurons. That's not to say she is right.
- StrawberryFrog 18y agoWhy ever not with "only" a few million neurons? Have you proved, mathematically, that there is a lower limit? How many neurons does it take to crunch a few patterns? I'd think that a couple thousand ought to do it.
- michael_nielsen 18y agoWhat's funny about this headline is that almost everything interacts with quantum fields. Indeed, that's what matter is. If you look at in the right way, a honeybee is what you get when you apply just the right sequence of field creation operators to the vacuum.
- sdurkin 18y agoEmperor's New Mind, anyone?
- joubert 18y agoRead Richard Dawkins.
- wenbert 18y agothey must do something to that site. way too painful to read.
- apis 18y agoThanks! Very interesting discussion, just let me add two little pieces of information that might be useful to the people who would like to inquire further: One of the first if not the first to propose quantum mechanical processes related to consciousness was Evan Harris Walker his book "The physics of consciousness" (Basic Books, 2000) which makes a very interesting reading. The latest on this, as far as I know, can be found in the book "Quantum Aspects of Life" (Word Scientific, 2008) Happy New Year!