
Honeybees are found to interact with quantum fields - prakash
http://science.box.sk/newsread.php?newsid=6321
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randomwalker
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.

~~~
yummyfajitas
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
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
He invoked Occam's Razor. But most of the other stuff he only mentioned.

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davidw
Interesting 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."

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StrawberryFrog
Sigh. 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
_bee 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
Why 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.

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gojomo
Awful 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
Given 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

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michael_nielsen
What'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.

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jrnkntl
Golden ratio, quantum mechanics... Those bees are quite sophisticated.

BTW: *.box.sk == old school

~~~
tdavis
Tell me you remember the timeless astalavista.box.sk ...

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apis
Thanks! 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!

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nazgulnarsil
box.sk found to interact with nut jobs

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sdurkin
Emperor's New Mind, anyone?

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wenbert
they must do something to that site. way too painful to read.

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joubert
Read Richard Dawkins.

