Happiness/Happiness research/Happiness, The Universal Law of/Free in the box

تحول در فلسفه شرقى:

از جمادی مردم و نامی شدم

وز نما مردم به حیوان برزدم

مردم از حیوانی و آدم شدم

پس چه ترسم کی ز مردن کم شدم

حملهٔ دیگر بمیرم از بشر

تا بر آرم از ملایک پر و سر

وز ملک هم بایدم جستن ز جو

کل شیء هالک الا وجهه

بار دیگر از ملک قربان شوم

آنچ اندر وهم ناید آن شوم

When an Agent, with no specific physical property, is trapped in an environment, it will respond in a certain fashion dictated by the constraints of the environment. Consider, for example, a particle in a box of length, L discussed in any elementary modern physics class. The agent must be absent on the edges of the box, ( its wave function vanishes at the locations of the edges), but is otherwise free in the box. It can also pick any of the allowed discrete energies determined by the parameter of the constraint, namely, L. The environment dictates the existence of the particle. The dimension of the box can only specify the location and energy of the particle. It is somewhere in the box of side L, with some specific energy depending on L. The governing equation that is a common knowledge in modern science called the Schrödinger equation. In other words, there is a governing law ( Shrodinger equation ) and some boundary conditions ( say, do not be on the boundaries ) dictated by the environment. If the particle is willing to exist, it must obey the law and the constraint of the environment.

According to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, finiteness of space-time leads energy-momentum of the agent. In other words, space-time causes the existence and the energy of the agent. It is commonly believed, in the scientific community, that the space-time itself is dynamic ( see Einstein's General relativity and Loop quantum gravity ). It is not the stage for the agent to exist and behave in. It is also believed that the agent has a physical property, its mass, because it is in the Higgs field.

It is reasonable to believe that there is only one kind of Agent as the building block of everything and one kind of Field with many different components. Different superpositions of these components leads to the existence of different agents. Also, different superpositions of these components leads to different physical properties of an agent. In other words, in the absence of the Field nothing exists. Different elementary particles with different physical properties are the same unique Agent in different superpositions of the Field components ( which form a complete set ).

What is the Agent? What is the Field? What is the governing Law? Answers to these questions lead to the Theory of Everything! To start, it is logical to propose that the dynamical Space-Time is the source of everything. The law governing the dynamic of Space-Time is the governing LAW ( Einstein Equation is an approximation to the LAW; a quantum mechanical version of the equation developed in Quantum gravity is a better approximation ). In short, the Universe Behaves by a LAW. Any thing which does not follow the Law is forced to be non-existent. Everything that happens in the Universe, means the LAW is obeyed, hence is just. There is no injustice. Lack of justice means not obeying the LAW which means non-existence.

New Hooshang Haghbin

ای بس که نباشیم و جهان خواهد بود

نی نام زما و نی‌نشان خواهد بود

زین پیش نبودیم و نبد هیچ خلل

زین پس چو نباشیم همان خواهد بود

Is reality defined by the observer? Or reality exists independently of observers?

Consciousness Chapter one

An old thought experiment may soon be realised

Chapter one

Can we detect quantum behavior in viruses?

Can we detect quantum behaviors in water & sound waves!

We need big machines to detect small particles!?

Existence is governed by a LAW. In other words, existence is lawful not purposeful. Earth is tiny fraction of the existence of some level of intelligence. Vegetation on earth has some what higher intelligence. Animals are another community of still higher intelligence. Humans are identities of relatively even higher intelligence. Let's concentrate on us; just earth and whatever exists on it. The rest of the Universe acts as our environment. It might be obvious how small we (i.e. Earth and else )are compared to our environment. Thermodynamically, the rest of existence is an ideal reservoir for us. This means, we are so infinitesimally small compared to our environment that what we do will not have any noticeable effect, whatsoever, on the environment. We are embedded in an huge reservoir. We act like a single particle in a system of infinitely many particles. Most definitely, we are governed by the LAW of the force dictated by rest of the Universe. What we do is just negligible local fluctuations which has negligible effect on the rest of Universe. Our existence does not add much to the Universe. The rest of the Universe is still almost equal to the Universe itself. As a matter of fact, even the so called our observed universe is only a tiny fraction of the actual Universe and is governed by the LAW dictated by the Universe. Please see : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe

Humans have learned how earth acts, how other residents of earth act, and how themselves act to some extent. Humans also began to learn what is happening in the observable universe. Beyond the edge of the observable universe, no one knows what is happening! We might learn more of "beyond the horizon " later in time! Light might move faster, then more will be known. Observable universe will be bigger and horizon will be farther. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe

Definition of "good" and "bad":

"Bad" is the absence of "good". What exists is "good". "Bad" is non-existence. Matter is good. Antimatter is bad. Remember electron and positron are both matter. Anti-electron is the absence of electron. Anti-positron is the absence of positron. When electron meets positron, they do not disappear; they turn into another existence. Surplus is good. Deficit is bad. Existence is good. Non-existence is bad. Bad is a nomad who leaves hole wherever it goes. When something moves from one point to another, a hole is left behind at one point but something is created at another point. Good creates wherever it goes.

How should the earth community be governed? Well, it should be governed by the best. If we consider everything including the earth, vegetations, animals, and humans as an spectrum of increasing intelligence, then this community must be governed by the choice people, not by, necessarily, the chosen people.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100311092429.ht

Can we detect quantum behavior in viruses? Date: March 11, 2010 Source: Institute of Physics Summary: Scientists are using the principles of an iconic quantum mechanics thought experiment -- Schrödinger's superpositioned cat -- to test for quantum properties in objects composed of as many as one billion atoms, possibly including the flu virus.

The weird world of quantum mechanics describes the strange, often contradictory, behaviour of small inanimate objects such as atoms. Researchers have now started looking for ways to detect quantum properties in more complex and larger entities, possibly even living organisms. A German-Spanish research group, split between the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), is using the principles of an iconic quantum mechanics thought experiment -- Schrödinger's superpositioned cat -- to test for quantum properties in objects composed of as many as one billion atoms, possibly including the flu virus. New research published on March 11 in New Journal of Physics describes the construction of an experiment to test for superposition states in these larger objects. Quantum optics is a field well-rehearsed in the process of detecting quantum properties in single atoms and some small molecules but the scale that these researchers wish to work at is unprecedented.

When physicists try to fathom exactly how the tiniest constituents of matter and energy behave, confusing patterns of their ability to do two things at once (referred to as being in a superposition state), and of their 'spooky' connection (referred to as entanglement) to their physically distant sub-atomic brethren, emerge. With this new technique, the researchers suggest that viruses are one type of object that could be probed. Albeit speculatively, the researchers hope that their technique might offer a route to experimentally address questions such as the role of life and consciousness in quantum mechanics. In order to test for superposition states, the experiment involves finely tuning lasers to capture larger objects such as viruses in an 'optical cavity' (a very tiny space), another laser to slow the object down (and put it into what quantum mechanics call a 'ground state') and then adding a photon (the basic element of light) in a specific quantum state to the laser to provoke it into a superposition The researchers say, "We hope that this system, apart from providing new quantum technology, will allow us to test quantum mechanics at larger scales, by preparing macroscopic superpositions of objects at the nano and micro scale. This could then enable us to use more complex microorganisms, and thus test the quantum superposition principle with living organisms by performing quantum optics experiments with them."

David L. Chandler | MIT News Office 
October 14, 2015 Press Inquiries

Nature has had billions of years to perfect photosynthesis, which directly or indirectly supports virtually all life on Earth. In that time, the process has achieved almost 100 percent efficiency in transporting the energy of sunlight from receptors to reaction centers where it can be harnessed — a performance vastly better than even the best solar cells. One way plants achieve this efficiency is by making use of the exotic effects of quantum mechanics — effects sometimes known as “quantum weirdness.” These effects, which include the ability of a particle to exist in more than one place at a time, have now been used by engineers at MIT to achieve a significant efficiency boost in a light-harvesting system. Surprisingly, the researchers at MIT and Eni, the Italian energy company, achieved this new approach to solar energy not with high-tech materials or microchips — but by using genetically engineered viruses. This achievement in coupling quantum research and genetic manipulation, described this week in the journal Nature Materials, was the work of MIT professors Angela Belcher, an expert on engineering viruses to carry out energy-related tasks, and Seth Lloyd, an expert on quantum theory and its potential applications; research associate Heechul Park; and 14 collaborators at MIT, Eni, and Italian universities. Lloyd, the Nam Pyo Suh Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, explains that in photosynthesis, a photon hits a receptor called a chromophore, which in turn produces an exciton — a quantum particle of energy. This exciton jumps from one chromophore to another until it reaches a reaction center, where that energy is harnessed to build the molecules that support life. But the hopping pathway is random and inefficient unless it takes advantage of quantum effects that allow mit, in effect, to take multiple pathways at once and select the best ones, behaving more like a wave than a particle. This efficient movement of excitons has one key requirement: The chromophores have to be arranged just right, with exactly the right amount of space between them. This, Lloyd explains, is known as the “Quantum Goldilocks Effect.” That’s where the virus comes in. By engineering a virus that Belcher has worked with for years, the team was able to get it to bond with multiple synthetic chromophores — or, in this case, organic dyes. The researchers were then able to produce many varieties of the virus, with slightly different spacings between those synthetic chromophores, and select the ones that performed best. In the end, they were able to more than double excitons’ speed, increasing the distance they traveled before dissipating — a significant improvement in the efficiency of the process. The project started at a workshop held at Eni's laboratories in Novara, Italy. Lloyd and Belcher, the James Mason Crafts Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering, were reporting on different projects they had worked on, and began discussing, along with Eni researchers, the possibility of a project encompassing their very different expertise. Lloyd, whose work is mostly theoretical, pointed out that the viruses Belcher works with have the right length scales to potentially support quantum effects. In 2008, Lloyd had published a paper demonstrating that photosynthetic organisms transmit light energy efficiently because of these quantum effects. When he saw Belcher’s report on her work with engineered viruses, he wondered if that might provide a way to artificially induce a similar effect, in an effort to approach nature’s efficiency. “I had been talking about potential systems you could use to demonstrate this effect, and Angela said, ‘We’re already making those,’” Lloyd recalls. Eventually, after much analysis, “We came up with design principles to redesign how the virus is capturing light, and get it to this quantum regime.” Within two weeks, Belcher’s team had created their first test version of the engineered virus. Many months of work then went into perfecting the receptors and the spacings. Once the team engineered the viruses, they were able to use laser spectroscopy and dynamical modeling to watch the light-harvesting process in action, and to demonstrate that the new viruses were indeed making use of quantum coherence to enhance the transport of excitons. “It was really fun,” Belcher says. “A group of us who spoke different [scientific] languages worked closely together, to both make this class of organisms, and analyze the data. That’s why I’m so excited by this.” While this initial result is essentially a proof of concept rather than a practical system, it points the way toward an approach that could lead to inexpensive and efficient solar cells or light-driven catalysis, the team says. So far, the engineered viruses collect and transport energy from incoming light, but do not yet harness it to produce power (as in solar cells) or molecules (as in photosynthesis). But this could be done by adding a reaction center, where such processing takes place, to the end of the virus where the excitons end up. “This is exciting and high-quality research,” says Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University who was not involved in this work. The research, he says, “combines the work of a leader in theory (Lloyd) and a leader in experiment (Belcher) in a truly multidisciplinary and exciting combination that spans biology to physics to potentially, future technology.” “ Access to controllable excitonic systems is a goal shared by many researchers in the field,” Aspuru-Guzik adds. “This work provides fundamental understanding that can allow for the development of devices with an increased control of exciton flow.” The research was supported by Eni through the MIT Energy Initiative. In addition to MIT postdocs Nimrod Heldman and Patrick Rebentrost, the team included researchers at the University of Florence, the University of Perugia, and Eni.

ONE of the most famous unperformed experiments in science is Schrödinger's cat. In 1935 Erwin Schrödinger (pictured), who was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, imagined putting a cat, a flask of Prussic acid, a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter, an electric relay and a hammer in a sealed box. If the atom decays, the Geiger counter detects the radiation and sends a signal that trips the relay, which releases the hammer, which smashes the flask and poisons the cat. The point of the experiment is that radioactive decay is a quantum process. The chance of the atom decaying in any given period is known. Whether it has actually decayed (and thus whether the cat is alive or dead) is not—at least until the box is opened. The animal exists, in the argot of the subject, in a “superposition” in which it is both alive and dead at the same time. Schrödinger's intention was to illuminate the paradoxes of the quantum world. But superposition (the existence of a thing in two or more quantum states simultaneously) is real and is, for example, the basis of quantum computing. A pair of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, now propose to do what Schrödinger could not, and put a living organism into a state of quantum superposition. The organism Ignacio Cirac and Oriol Romero-Isart have in mind is the flu virus. Pedants might object that viruses are not truly alive, but that is a philosophical rather than a naturalistic argument, for they have genes and are capable of reproduction—a capability they lose if they are damaged. The reason for choosing a virus is that it is small. Actual superposition (as opposed to the cat-in-a-box sort) is easiest with small objects, for which there are fewer pathways along which the superposition can break down. Physicists have already put photons, electrons, atoms and even entire molecules into such a state and measured the outcome. In the view of Dr Cirac and Dr Romero-Isart, a virus is just a particularly large molecule, so existing techniques should work on it. The other thing that helps maintain superposition is low temperature. The less something jiggles about because of heat-induced vibration, the longer it can remain superposed. Dr Cirac and Dr Romero-Isart therefore propose putting the virus inside a microscopic cavity and cooling it down to its state of lowest energy (ground state, in physics parlance) using a piece of apparatus known as a laser trap. This ingenious technique—which won its inventors, one of whom was Steven Chu, now America's energy secretary, a Nobel prize—works by bombarding an object with laser light at a frequency just below that which it would readily absorb and re-emit if it were stationary. This slows down the movement, and hence the temperature, of its atoms to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Once that is done, another laser pulse will jostle the virus from its ground state into an excited state, just as a single atom is excited by moving one of its electrons from a lower to a higher orbital. By properly applying this pulse, Dr Cirac believes it will be possible to leave the virus in a superposition of the ground and excited states. For that to work, however, the virus will need to have certain physical properties. It will have to be an insulator and to be transparent to the relevant laser light. And it will have to be able to survive in a vacuum. Such viruses do exist. The influenza virus is one example. Its resilience is legendary. It can survive exposure to a vacuum, and it seems to be an insulator—which is why the researchers have chosen it. And if the experiment works on a virus, they hope to move on to something that is indisputably alive: a tardigrade. Tardigrades are tiny but resilient arthropods. They can survive in vacuums and at very low temperatures. And, although the difference between ground state and an excited state is not quite the difference between life and death, Schrödinger would no doubt have been amused that his 70-year-old jeu d'esprit has provoked such an earnest following.

Emerging Technology from the arXiv A View from Emerging Technology from the arXiv

How to Create Quantum Superpositions of Living Things

First photons, atoms and molecules. Now physicists want to create a quantum superposition of a virus, which will allow them to perform Schrodinger’s Cat experiment for real.

September 10, 2009

One of the great challenges for quantum physicists is to find quantum behaviour in macroscopic objects. There are obvious examples of quantum behaviour on a large scale, such as superconductivity and superfluidity, but physicists want more.

Having created quantum superpositions of photons, electrons, atoms and even molecules, one of the current obsessions is to create a quantum superposition of a living thing, such as a virus. The question is how to do this and whether it makes any sense to say these things are living at all.

This is an experiment that will be hard. But today Oriol Romero-Isart from the Max-Planck-Institut fur Quantenoptik in Germany and a few buddies suggest that it is achievable with current technology and outline the challenges that will have to be tackled to pull it off.

The experiment will first involve storing a virus in a vacuum and then cooling it to its quantum mechanical ground state in a microcavity. Zapping the virus with a laser then leaves it in a superposition of the ground state and an excited one.

This works only if the virus behaves like a dielectric, can survive the vacuum and appears transparent to laser light, which would otherwise rip it apart.

As luck would have it, Romero-Isart and co say that several viruses fit the bill. The common flu virus is known to be able to survive in a vacuum, seems to have the required dielectric properties and may well be transparent to a careful choice of laser light. The tobacco mosaic virus, to all intents and purposes a dielectric rod, looks like another good candidate.

But does it make any sense to say that a large molecule in its ground state is somehow alive? It’s difficult enough now to define what life means. Throw a quantum superposition into the mix and the biologists who ponder these problems are likely to implode.

Nevertheless, many groups are currently looking to create superpositions of things like tiny cantilevers and micromirrors, so viruses certainly look achievable in the near future. And beyond that, why not bigger organism such as the tardigrade (or water bear) which can grow to 1.5 mm in length.

But why bother? Performing a Schrodinger’s cat experiment would be fun (although not for the virus). Romero-Isart and pals go further and say the work will “experimentally address fundamental questions, such as the role of life in quantum mechanics,and differences between many-world and Copenhagen interpretations”. Perhaps.

But their contention that it will also address “the role of consciousness in quantum mechanics” seems a step too far (although a flu virus may beg to differ).

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0909.1469: Towards Quantum Superposition of Living Organisms