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Horrible headline. The part of the article that talks about quantum mumbo-jumbo is prefaced with this: "At this point Shipman departs from safely grounded sch

Horrible 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 ago
No 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 ago
  Actually, 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    Exactly. The idea that bees could somehow be experiencing a six-dimensional manifold doesn't seem crazy to me.
    - Retric 18y ago
      Bee'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.
- helveticaman 18y ago
  True. I would like to add that an eye can detect a single photon, but there's really no way to use that meaningfully to make use of quantum mechanics at a bee-level.
scott_s 18y ago
Speculation, yes, but it's still science. She has a theory, and hopefully she'll come up with a way to test it. This is how progress happens. I modded the story up not because of the content releated to the headline, but because it appears the bee dances are 2D projections of the flag manifolds she studies. She may be wrong about the mechanism she proposed for why this happens, but when you find things that fit together so neatly in the natural world, that's a clear sign: this warrants investigation.
- geuis 18y ago
  Its only a hypothesis until she can find a way to test it. She discovered a similar mathematical principle that encompasses the envelope of recorded bee dances. That is not necessarily the only mathematical principle which can contain the same envelope. She then starts thinking about quantum states of quarks and such but doesn't have a valid way to test this yet. Its similar to ideas some people have that the brain utilizes quantum effects. No one has been able to experimentally prove or disprove this idea yet, therefore its still a hypothesis. If she, as a mathematician, had at least an encompassing mathematical model that could theorize how a bee's brain could interact on a neuronal level with quarks, then we could venture into calling it a theory. She doesn't have that though, so its still only a hypothesis.
  - scott_s 18y ago
    Yes, you are correct. But I think my point still stands.
yummyfajitas 18y ago
Indeed. Perhaps I can explain a little more what she discovered, and why this connection to QFT is almost surely nonsense. The flag manifold in question comes from matrix groups; basically, consider some subset of 3x3 matrices which satisfy a certain property. I.e., certain types of transformations of a 3d space. While the space of 3x3 matrices has 3x3=9 dimensions, subsets can have fewer dimensions (in this case, 6). The two-dimensional projections she discovered are functions of the 6 dimensional matrices. So here is the occams razor explanation for what is happening. Inside the bee's head is an ODE (ordinary differential equation) solver, basically an analog computer. Just think of the ODE solver as a complicated timer, but with output depending on both time and some hidden variable. These are common objects in biology, and don't require many neurons. The output of the ODE solver is wired to some neurons which reduce 6 variables to 2, according to the formula she discovered. This is a fantastic discovery, a triumph of applied math. But the connection to QFT is almost surely coincidence: QFT uses symmetries of matrix groups over 3 dimensions, and the bee (which lives in 3 dimensions) also does. This phenomenon is called universality. Certain objects repeat across diverse areas simply because it is the only logical way (or the most common logical way) that things could happen.
- snorkel 18y ago
  All at once you brought together Occam's Razor, Universality, differential equations, manifolds, and quantum field theory into a comment I actually understand. You should teach.
  - eru 18y ago
    He invoked Occam's Razor. But most of the other stuff he only mentioned.
  - eru 18y ago
    It's a nice comment. But: He invoked Occam's Razor. Most of the other stuff he only mentioned.
  - eru 18y ago
    It's a nice comment. But: He invoked Occam's Razor. Most of the other stuff he only mentioned.
nadim 18y ago
This critique raises some interesting points: http://www.ortholog.com/archive/in_response/bees_arent_quantum.php http://www.ortholog.com/archive/in_response/bees_arent_quant... """... Just because it takes a lot of maths doesn't mean it isn't easy to do. Mathematics is a (formal language for the) description of events, not the other way round. Take integration for example, the mathematical operation of finding the integral e.g. finding the area under a curve specified by a quadratic equation. There are humans with 1.75kg of brain tissue that can't do that, so it must be hard, right? However, it takes just a handful of electronic components to devise a circuit that outputs the integral. Can we really say for certain that there isn't a simple enough circuit you can build out of bee neurones to compute the angles encoded in the waggle dance? Of course not. It was recently shown by Elbing and coworkers that we can build some electronic components from single molecules. It isn't intrinsically hard; it's just hard to write down. A bee doesn't need "equipment sensitive to the quantum-mechanical world"; it just needs visual acuity and some simple circuitry. Well, two circuits. First, an encoder that takes inputs from its primitive memory, recently stimulated by the food discovery and the excited journey home noting sun/horizon landmarks, and outputs the dance. And secondly, a decoder to recognise the dance before its cute little compound eyes and compute the relevant angles for navigation. It sounds complicated but it isn't. Consider this: how complex are the mathematical operations required for a human to catch a thrown ball? Pretty complex and likely to take up a lot of paper--but, crucially, they don't take up a lot of brain circuitry if such things can, after Elbing (or more properly, billions of years before Elbing), be built of a handful of molecules. Just because a rational, sentient, conscious process struggles to achieve a thing doesn't make it a hard thing to do. Doing is easier than computing, for most values of "do" and "compute"."""

ars 18y ago

No 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 ago
Actually, 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 ago
The 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 ago
  Exactly. The idea that bees could somehow be experiencing a six-dimensional manifold doesn't seem crazy to me.
  - Retric 18y ago
    Bee'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.
helveticaman 18y ago
True. I would like to add that an eye can detect a single photon, but there's really no way to use that meaningfully to make use of quantum mechanics at a bee-level.

scott_s 18y ago

Speculation, yes, but it's still science. She has a theory, and hopefully she'll come up with a way to test it. This is how progress happens. I modded the story up not because of the content releated to the headline, but because it appears the bee dances are 2D projections of the flag manifolds she studies. She may be wrong about the mechanism she proposed for why this happens, but when you find things that fit together so neatly in the natural world, that's a clear sign: this warrants investigation.

geuis 18y ago
Its only a hypothesis until she can find a way to test it. She discovered a similar mathematical principle that encompasses the envelope of recorded bee dances. That is not necessarily the only mathematical principle which can contain the same envelope. She then starts thinking about quantum states of quarks and such but doesn't have a valid way to test this yet. Its similar to ideas some people have that the brain utilizes quantum effects. No one has been able to experimentally prove or disprove this idea yet, therefore its still a hypothesis. If she, as a mathematician, had at least an encompassing mathematical model that could theorize how a bee's brain could interact on a neuronal level with quarks, then we could venture into calling it a theory. She doesn't have that though, so its still only a hypothesis.
- scott_s 18y ago
  Yes, you are correct. But I think my point still stands.

yummyfajitas 18y ago

Indeed. Perhaps I can explain a little more what she discovered, and why this connection to QFT is almost surely nonsense. The flag manifold in question comes from matrix groups; basically, consider some subset of 3x3 matrices which satisfy a certain property. I.e., certain types of transformations of a 3d space. While the space of 3x3 matrices has 3x3=9 dimensions, subsets can have fewer dimensions (in this case, 6). The two-dimensional projections she discovered are functions of the 6 dimensional matrices. So here is the occams razor explanation for what is happening. Inside the bee's head is an ODE (ordinary differential equation) solver, basically an analog computer. Just think of the ODE solver as a complicated timer, but with output depending on both time and some hidden variable. These are common objects in biology, and don't require many neurons. The output of the ODE solver is wired to some neurons which reduce 6 variables to 2, according to the formula she discovered. This is a fantastic discovery, a triumph of applied math. But the connection to QFT is almost surely coincidence: QFT uses symmetries of matrix groups over 3 dimensions, and the bee (which lives in 3 dimensions) also does. This phenomenon is called universality. Certain objects repeat across diverse areas simply because it is the only logical way (or the most common logical way) that things could happen.

snorkel 18y ago
All at once you brought together Occam's Razor, Universality, differential equations, manifolds, and quantum field theory into a comment I actually understand. You should teach.
- eru 18y ago
  He invoked Occam's Razor. But most of the other stuff he only mentioned.
- eru 18y ago
  It's a nice comment. But: He invoked Occam's Razor. Most of the other stuff he only mentioned.
- eru 18y ago
  It's a nice comment. But: He invoked Occam's Razor. Most of the other stuff he only mentioned.

nadim 18y ago

This critique raises some interesting points: http://www.ortholog.com/archive/in_response/bees_arent_quantum.php http://www.ortholog.com/archive/in_response/bees_arent_quant... """... Just because it takes a lot of maths doesn't mean it isn't easy to do. Mathematics is a (formal language for the) description of events, not the other way round. Take integration for example, the mathematical operation of finding the integral e.g. finding the area under a curve specified by a quadratic equation. There are humans with 1.75kg of brain tissue that can't do that, so it must be hard, right? However, it takes just a handful of electronic components to devise a circuit that outputs the integral. Can we really say for certain that there isn't a simple enough circuit you can build out of bee neurones to compute the angles encoded in the waggle dance? Of course not. It was recently shown by Elbing and coworkers that we can build some electronic components from single molecules. It isn't intrinsically hard; it's just hard to write down. A bee doesn't need "equipment sensitive to the quantum-mechanical world"; it just needs visual acuity and some simple circuitry. Well, two circuits. First, an encoder that takes inputs from its primitive memory, recently stimulated by the food discovery and the excited journey home noting sun/horizon landmarks, and outputs the dance. And secondly, a decoder to recognise the dance before its cute little compound eyes and compute the relevant angles for navigation. It sounds complicated but it isn't. Consider this: how complex are the mathematical operations required for a human to catch a thrown ball? Pretty complex and likely to take up a lot of paper--but, crucially, they don't take up a lot of brain circuitry if such things can, after Elbing (or more properly, billions of years before Elbing), be built of a handful of molecules. Just because a rational, sentient, conscious process struggles to achieve a thing doesn't make it a hard thing to do. Doing is easier than computing, for most values of "do" and "compute"."""