Would like to remind of the context that this is Bosworth’s blog. Agrippa to the Augustus. Before trying to shame him, consider that he might have learnt his lessons the hard way.
In the final paragraph, the author concurs with Goethe in 1796. LIFE=LIFE. Schroedinger, who must have been fully cognizant of what Goethe meant (need to check when I have access to my library), went on to then ask the obvious next question:
The way my inner child handwaves it away: you have the electron wavefunction spread out, say, it’s equally likely to be in one of 2 points in space. If you only look at one of these 2 points, you are likely to measure only half an electron.. until an adult (say, you) corrects me (using the Feynman Dirac hand/belt trick)
That explains having a 50% chance of seeing an electron somewhere, not seeing an entity of charge 1/2. It's like a weather report saying there's a 50% chance of rain doesn't mean you're going to see little raindrops cut in half.
If you look at the experiments, they don’t mention observing a single entity of fractional charge, it is always in terms of aggregate behavior under EM fields: conductance(1) inferred from shot noise (2), or density (3)
Personally, I find it curious that people talk about detecting single photons, but in these fractional charge experiments, nobody mentions detecting a single quasiparticle.
As for the math, nobody says it outright, or even in a single paragraph, but a fractional charge (“filling fraction”) of p/q does correspond to p “normal” charges distributed over q degenerate states (q=2 equivalent locations I used in the naive example)
> Personally, I find it curious that people talk about detecting single photons, but in these fractional charge experiments, nobody mentions detecting a single quasiparticle.
You detect a single photon when it perturbs an apparatus like a photon multiplier; you detect a single quasiparticle when it perturbs a split stream of electrons.
The apparent difference is that photons can travel through free space and strike such an apparatus from afar; while quasiparticles definitionally cannot. However, I’ve read about experiments that measure a single anyon on a dot by wrapping electron interferometry around it, which is measuring the lone quasiparticle on that dot.
I still think my point, originally about 1 electron split into 2 locations, or “ends” of string (but devolving to a complaint about casual ignorance of the central issue in publications) hasn’t been completely destroyed, because here you are measuring interference of 2 anyons, somewhat like measuring the interference of a photon “with itself” in a double split experiment.
The broader point could be that the effect of a single photon is “localized”, but here to see the effect, you have to move 1 anyon in a “complete path” around the other, recalling the Feynman/Dirac belt in my top level comment, a trick I said an adult should try to correct me with :)
For those, like me, who wondered, why not just reclone the original Darling 58?
Here is the answer from TACF:
“ Why not then return to the “real” Darling 58? The first reason is that the Darling 58 also uses the 35S constitutive promoter which appears to result in a variety of metabolic costs to the tree and likely causes the majority of performance problems observed in the Darling line. Secondly, there are only a handful, and perhaps even only one, D58 tree(s) in existence. These trees are at either the T0 or T1 stage (the original event and first-generation offspring). If work is to start over at those early diversification stages, it makes sense to focus on new OxO lines that express the gene only in tissues infected with blight. Confining OxO expression to blight infected tissues should reduce the metabolic cost of expressing this gene, thus these new lines are more likely to have enhanced forest competitiveness.”
I’m still confused, why can’t they return to the real Darling 58? Are they saying even the real 58 is not that good, and if they are going to rewind that far back they might as well start from scratch?
I reread the above and realized that TACF isn’t as clear as they should/could be: they are supporting a newer strain, win3.12 [0], which, as alluded to above, expresses the OxO gene only when infected. This is metabolically less expensive. Thus there is no reason to spend effort looking for the Darling 58. I also gather from other sources that the TACF want to downplay that they are switching to this new strain, that this development of finding a bug in Darling 54 is a political salve[1] —- maybe they don’t want to offend somebody?
“ instability is defined as the relative propensity of the subunit to undergo a physical disintegration of its structure, either spontaneously, or through the action of degradative agent such as an enzyme.”
Relative to what? other subunits.
The caption to figure 2:
“ If the B subunit is less stable than A subunit (indicated in gray font), this leads to a reduced population of AB replicators and free A subunits; this represents a more complex system because it yields a set with two distinct members.”
It’s not clear to me if this is the most general example they can think of, but later in the paper they relate SAI to a particular cellular automaton, Langton’s loop.
Overall 6/10, requires work, more erudite reviewers/promoters, or quantamagazine to determine if the field is indeed interesting.
One may cite Grothendieck as counterexamples, but maybe they still only had themselves in their adjacent subfields (at the time they made their most impactful discoveries, anyway)
Notably absent from article: the surprisingly equanimous opinion of Boz —- Agrippa to Zuck’s Augustus. I have to reread his post on perverse incentives now
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