Quantum Computation and Evolution?

We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding out that we must learn a great deal more about 'and'."- Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944)

Of course a lot of this post has to do with the post created by Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance.

Sean Carroll:

Nobody would just be sitting around in their armchair, thinking deep thoughts about the nature of spacetime, and say “Hey, maybe if we look at quantum gravity with anti-de Sitter boundary conditions, it will be dual to a large-N conformal field theory in Minkowski space.” You had to be led there, bit by bit, by struggling to understand the individual puzzles presented by different pieces of the theory along the way. And it paid off big-time.

What he said caught my attention because I had been thinking of so many things piece meal, that when I realized the beauty extracted from the chaos, I couldn't help see things working on a sociological level as well. Sure, we can be arm chair philosophers, with systemic approaches that are computational in disquise, that at first glance would seem....um.....crackpotish?


Deep in the interior of a red giant star, hydrogen rich clouds (red) are seen to float above the hydrogen burning shell (blue)
Click here for high resolution image.>

It seems such insight gained from all the articles I have read, that have been shared with me, have amounted to nothing? Here I am, sitting in the pottism of my own...er I mean, "others" illusions which I continue to perpetuate?:)

What can be said about journalism is that within it's stories the substance of scientific thought is being generated/not generated?

Despite the universe's tendency towards disarray (like the socks in your drawer), there is a surprising amount of spontaneous order in the universe: stars clump into galaxies, atoms combine to form organized crystals, ants work together in a colony, species interact with each other and the physical environment to form ecosystems, cells build the different parts of a person, and neurons coordinate their firing to produce thought. When thousands of components get together in just the right way, something remarkable happens—they fall into recognizable, persistent patterns in space or in time. We live in a universe in which interactions among the basic building blocks of matter, or among individuals in our societies, give rise to unpredicted and unexpected emergent behavior. This occurs for many different types of things, large and small, living and inanimate.

Emergence is the study of how order arises from chaos, of how the interactions of simple objects with each other and their environment give rise to highly complex and often surprising behaviors.

Synchrony pervades the living world: some types of fireflies will flash in unison, the cacophony of crickets converges to a unified chirping, and populations of locusts swarm every 17 years. More sophisticated synchrony is found in the life cycle of an ant colony. Individual ants react robotically to chemical signals left by their neighbors during their short life span, while the colony as a whole lives, matures, and dies as a single organism that outlives any of its constituent, crawling parts.

While the wording of emergence is being entertained here it's applicability is far reaching. While being governed by the statement of Witten, it is not without understanding that the world and universe we have gone through in "computation evolutionary changes" allow us to see the dynamics of the universe in unique ways. It has to be mathematically consistent, or computationally it does not work out?

1. Quantum Matter (atoms in a crystal, electrons in a superconductor)

2. Soft Matter (the stacking and flow of ball bearings)

3. Living Things
(ant colonies, evolution, neural networks)

4. Social and Economic Behavior (cities, traffic, economies)

So in the instance I shared in terms of the neutrinos and the "value of the sun" in contemplation, such pictures of nature while very detailed microscopically in perspective, are still quite beautiful over all to look at.


The ribosome is a living factory, the essential element within cells that creates proteins by decoding each protein type's specific recipe that is stored within messenger RNA. Ribosomes are a fundamental model for future nano-machines, producing the protein building blocks of all living tissue. Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory have set a new world's record by performing the first million-atom computer simulation in biology. Using the "Q Machine" supercomputer, Los Alamos computer scientists have created a molecular simulation of the cell's protein-making structure, the ribosome. The project, simulating 2.64 million atoms in motion, is more than six times larger than any biological simulations performed to date. Today, the effort is featured in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While all these ideas of photons "dancing in my head" I couldn't help but think of, "I" Robot.

I, Robot:

signs of new life emerge as images photonically flicker in the new logic forming apparatus

I had a dream....