Will Twenty-First Century Physics Need Biology?
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ViseMorningJosephson-KontaktHot isostatic pressingDayYearCurrent densityCommitteeEffects unitQuantum tunnellingLecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
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Model buildingQuantumMeasurementComaFaltenbildungDigital electronicsHingeModel buildingNyquist stability criterionElectronic componentTransmission (mechanics)Constraint (mathematics)Digital electronicsScaffoldingSunriseCrystal structureHot workingFlavour (particle physics)Cartridge (firearms)WoodturningSpecific weightSpare partCocktail party effectTire balanceBuick CenturyUniverseSignal (electrical engineering)ProzessleittechnikPackaging and labelingBook designTheodoliteMonthOrder and disorder (physics)AdsorptionBahnelementYearNightSwitchAtmosphere of EarthProtectionDrehmasseLecture/Conference
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Gravitational singularityStud weldingTypesettingOrder and disorder (physics)Group delay and phase delayBecherwerkCasting defectRulerStormPickup truckUltraInertial navigation systemModel buildingTin canOrder and disorder (physics)PaperSpare partAnalog signalMechanicCrystallizationQuantum fluctuationSteckverbinderSoundFoot (unit)AmplitudeLiberty shipProzessleittechnikCartridge (firearms)Ground (electricity)NeutronenaktivierungQuantumCrystal structureGameCondenser (heat transfer)Series and parallel circuitsStock (firearms)StonewareWater vaporPlane (tool)UniverseFinishing (textiles)DrehmasseTypesettingModel buildingFlightBasis (linear algebra)Hot workingDirect currentDigital electronicsMeasurementFocus (optics)VideoPattern (sewing)GalaxyWind waveSunriseBird vocalizationWatchNear field communicationFACTS (newspaper)
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:14
Good morning, everyone. I welcome you to the first Agora session of this day,
00:22
and it will be presented by Professor Josephson. Professor Josephson got his Nobel Prize in 1973. Think about it. That's 46 years ago. That's a long, long time. And the sentence of the Nobel Committee was a very long sentence,
00:41
for theoretical predictions of the properties of a super current through a tunnel barrier, in particular, those phenomena which are generally known as the Josephson effect. And in addition, I would like to mention, if you go to his home page, you'll find on how many subjects he's interested in,
01:03
and you'll find things like quantum mechanics and the paranormal, observer mechanics and mind processes, the physics of mind and thought, etc., etc. So he's a very broad-minded person, and he will talk today about this subject, which you see there.
01:22
Please. Well, thank you very much. My subject, as you have seen, is how physics and biology will be combined in this century,
01:43
and it will be completely transformed, I believe. I hope to be able to persuade you of this. Somewhat unusually, I'm going to start with the acknowledgements, because this will give you a flavor of what's involved. Some of the themes. One important theme is coordination dynamics.
02:06
Well, the whole point is things are happening in biology. It's being understood better than in more detail. The logic of biology is being understood very well, and this is what I think will transform physics.
02:22
Coordination dynamics is about how systems work together. There's biosemiotics, which is about how meaning is relevant to biology. Karen Barrett has an interesting book. She's about the only one who's really connected biology with physics, or it's really human behavior.
02:41
She's saying, why is it only human observers are causing things to happen? We may have observers in the quantum world as well. Is there anything we can do about this beeping? Yeah.
03:03
I'm doing my own recording as well, just in case yours goes wrong. Okay. Kaufman has a very interesting book, World Beyond Physics, where he's saying biology is not subject to the constraints of the systems that physicists work with.
03:23
And that is a key point. Quantum mechanics works fantastically well, but to test it, you have to use the kind of systems which you can readily apply quantum mechanics. So in other words, it's self-confirming. I'll say a little bit more about that.
03:46
So I'll say it's an equation-oriented approach. You look at things that can be measured, and biology is different. However, I'm interested to see in some of the talks that have been at the meeting that similar things,
04:03
similar changes are happening in physics. I was impressed by, for example, the computer simulation of galaxies, and I think people may have pointed out that it looked like life. So physics is moving towards biology,
04:21
but my whole point is that biologists have discovered things which physicists haven't yet discovered because they've looked at a different kind of system. And physics will be transformed by putting these additional ideas in. Because we have a deeper understanding of life's subtleties.
04:43
So my basic hypothesis is that nature is essentially biological. It's organized in the same way as ordinary life is organized. And the strange properties in the quantum domain are because it's like life. In fact, there's a connection between the entanglement, which is emphasized this morning, and coordination in biology.
05:04
All sorts of connections. So anyway, physics will be able to learn from biological insights. Actually, back in the 1980s, I worked with Michael Conrad and Dipanka Holm, and we noticed it was actually mysticism we worked from.
05:25
But anyway, we found that you can make some nice parallels between what happens in the quantum world and in biology. You can read that paper, Realist Psychobiological Interpretation of Reality.
05:42
It's in the archive. Now, I think my slide, a couple of slides back, used the words limited and confused. Yeah, a limited and confused picture of reality. So let me just make that point.
06:01
First of all, the Schrodinger's cat, which everybody knows about, the cat which is half alive and half dead, if you follow Schrodinger's equations. Of course, when you look, you see that the cat is either alive or dead.
06:22
If the cat is alive, it also knows it's alive before you looked in the box. So how do you deal with that? A collapse of wave function, or is it many worlds, or the Ithaca interpretation? There's no consensus, so I submit that quantum mechanics needs repair. We need a better concept to explain it.
06:44
Second difficulty with quantum mechanics is dealing with biology. This is another of my papers, which is in the archive. I consider a question, how would you actually do a quantum calculation of biology? It's all right on a small scale where you just look at a little reaction.
07:04
But what about the organization of life? And it's not very clear how you do that. And I think I concluded you might need to put the wave function of the universe in before you could deal with biology. Anyway, that's another region where quantum mechanics has problems.
07:21
Now some people, Henry Stapp is the one who's done the most about this perhaps. Is mind in some form involved in quantum phenomena? Well, quite a few people have suggested this in the past. I'll read these quotes. So James Jeans said, the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.
07:43
Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder. Perhaps we should hail it as great and governor of the realm of matter. I suppose all these things came from considering the role of the observer. Dyson, matter in quantum mechanics is not an inert substance,
08:01
but an active agent constantly making choices between alternative possibilities, etc. Wheeler, I think this is quite close to what I'm gonna be covering. If the views that we're exploring, this is in an article called Law Without Law.
08:23
One principle, observer participants see suffices to build everything. Well, Wheeler introduced this idea to emphasize that in quantum mechanics, observation is not a passive process. It causes changes.
08:42
So in other words, the observer is participating. And he said, just as in 20 questions, you ask a lot of questions and you zero down into what the thing being you're trying to discover is. The same way, if you look at nature, try and find out enough things about it,
09:01
that may produce the laws that we observe. But he didn't have any idea as to how this might happen. That was pure speculation. Penrose and Hammeroff have said something similar, orchestrated reduction. Stapp, as I mentioned, he's written books about this. This is a quote. A mental event occurs that grasps a whole unit of structural information
09:23
and injects it into the quantum state of the universe. David Bohm, he introduced the idea of, he calls soma significance. Every part of nature has two sides, matter and meaning.
09:41
Let me just leave that for a moment. And these are ideas. There are more philosophy than science. So now I want to make the important distinction. We want to make this, turn it into real physics. What is needed to turn it into real physics?
10:02
Well, I say physics involves more than words and ideas. Physics requires a more systematic approach, and that involves, at the very least, well-defined models. In other words, you take your idea, you produce a model that expresses that idea. You can see how well the model implements the idea.
10:21
You may work with toy models, or you may try and make your models fit actual experiments. So that's the point. And I think we're now at the point where this will be possible. These vague ideas, it'll be possible to turn them into proper models and theories.
10:41
So let me just mention Bharad's ideas. Karen Bharad has this book, Meeting the Universe Halfway, the Entitlement of Matter and Meaning, I believe. So she has an ontology where the basic things that exist are agencies, and these interact in special ways, which she calls intra-actions.
11:04
And these produce phenomena. Well, that's quite similar to a biological approach. And notice that relationships are crucial. This is an essential idea. Unless your component parts relate in the right way, you will not generate the phenomenon of interest.
11:23
And this is very close to the biologist's idea of coordination dynamics. And coordination dynamics is something where you can produce mathematical models, and you can compare them with reality. Okay, so now let's look into what are these various insights from the life sciences.
11:46
Well, the point I want to make, what I've been finding, is that it's like a jigsaw puzzle. There are lots of pieces of a puzzle, and when you have enough pieces, put them together the right way, the right relationships, you start to see the whole picture.
12:02
So I think we now have a whole picture which physicists will be able to work on. So now I'll go through the various pieces. First of all, we actually go back to the 19th century. Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who was actually thrown out of his university,
12:25
they had the trick of sacking everybody and then reappointing everybody, except him, apparently, to get rid of his ideas, because he didn't like his idea of truth. He was saying truth is expressed in terms of language,
12:41
so you have to consider how language works. Anyway, so he had this theory of signs, and the sign is something that has meaning. The important thing is in between the two there is a process of interpretation. So it's not like ordinary transmission of information. You are, as a special process, interpretation,
13:01
maybe a highly developed process to get signs to work. Towards the end of the 20th century, some biologists picked up this idea, and they researched biological systems, quite a number of aspects of biological systems which involve signs.
13:24
For example, any skill involves taking into account what is meaningful in terms of that skill. For example, when you're walking, balance, and the information about balance is important. So you don't work with just any information in biology.
13:41
You work with meaning, and this determines the design of a system. There's quite a bit of literature on that subject now. Other concepts, I'll say a bit more about coordination
14:03
and about semiotic scaffolding. Well, this is just really a list I'll go into in more detail. Symbolic signs are quite interesting. Someone called Terence Deakin wrote a book on Man, the Symbolic Species. It turns out that signs work in three ways.
14:21
One is the iconic, which means the sign is very close to what it's symbolizing. There's the indexical system in which it's used as a kind of label. Both these versions of signs work on the current situation, where symbolic signs can work with a situation which is totally divorced from current reality.
14:43
So it's a kind of abstraction. So mathematics and so on, and theoretical physics, these involve a special kind of sign. And Deakin is a part of it, which would be relevant if we wanted to explain physics. It would mean a different kind of sign might be at work.
15:07
Now let me raise the idea, how is it that we can do science without mathematical calculation? You might think physics is the only real science
15:21
because that has mathematics and that's the real stuff. And yet, biologists do that stuff quite happily without doing calculations on the whole. Well, one way of understanding this is to say that a concept constrains the possibilities.
15:41
Concepts give rise to specific models. They constrain what you want to work with. So a given paradigm will have its own concepts and this will very much structure the research. And that's basically what biology does. You make models based on concepts like genetic code,
16:01
immune system and so on, homeostasis. Always focus your attention on what's important and so you can work on the logic there. Another case of constraints which is relevant to the physics of life is that life is highly constrained
16:20
because to put systems together randomly, you get something that won't survive. So you're dealing with very special kinds of system in life. And that's a bit different from physics. You do have, of course, you have stability in physics and that's fairly simple kind of structures you're dealing with.
16:40
In biology, you have very complicated structures which happen to be stable over time. They regenerate themselves. So that would be relevant to physics if we were interested. I mentioned Kaufman's book, A World Beyond Physics, and so he's emphasizing the way that you can do things in biology
17:03
which are beyond physics. And yet I want to say that we want to apply biology to physics. And you might ask, well, how can biology be connected with physics? It's dealing with something totally different. The answer roughly is that you have a certain kind of organization.
17:21
In biology, that tends to be applied to things like molecules, specific molecules or neuronal signals and complexes. But the organization may be the same without ordinary biology. In other words, there are some things which are like life
17:40
or could be things that are like life that work in the same sort of ways but are different from ordinary life. And so this fits the hypothesis that Konrad Holm and myself had. Our conclusion was since there are all these parallels between the quantum world and life,
18:01
there must be something, a common underlying mechanism. So I'm now saying the common underlying mechanism will use all these biological principles. Okay, so where are we? Yes, one way you can talk about this is to say that
18:21
biology involves a kind of order that we are not familiar with in physics. Because physics wants to treat things mathematically, it likes to do nice, regular kinds of order like crystals. However, as I mentioned at the beginning, not all of physics is like that.
18:41
There's this picture you saw, this video you saw yesterday of the behavior of galaxies at the beginning of the universe. That is very much biological. That's very consistent with what I'm saying and shows that physics in various ways is moving in the right direction.
19:03
You won't, so you may have to use computer simulation to get the facts rather than ordinary mathematics working with formulae. Another point is that this order emerges spontaneously. Of course, you may want to call it organization more of an order
19:23
since you may not be able to see the order very well. Fascinating thing about language is it comes from almost nothing because we certainly aren't programmed with any particular language or even a particular grammar. There is some specific software, as it were,
19:42
which over time develops step by step, both in individuals and in communities. Individuals have the environment of language and so step by step they develop a corresponding system. But then people get new ideas of using language.
20:09
Okay, let me see. Anyway, I'll say a little bit more about this in a moment, but language evolves because of various principles
20:23
that constrain what language can do. So this special complexity, characteristic of life, develops on the basis of well-defined mechanisms. I've already said that these watches involve
20:42
zero-dynamical systems where the same analyses apply. There are very many processes going on and there's coordination between these processes to produce a hierarchy similar to computer software, but it'll be physical processes, dynamics will be what's involved there.
21:03
An important point made by Kelso when I was in student I was talking, I think, with John Maffer yesterday and he said, look, this is an interesting paper and that paper is actually a physics paper with an identical idea. There's a competition between individuality and coordination.
21:22
In other words, systems have to coordinate to make units, but then these units must remain, keep their individual identity. You can see that these two competing processes give rise to the structures, the special structures that we see.
21:42
And instead of processes being on all the time, they get turned on and off. And according to what fits the structure, this again has been studied in some detail brain mechanisms and so on. Also, part of the evolution is a given process develops a mechanism which will help it survive.
22:03
So again, everything is all sitting together in a nice tidy way. Maybe I shouldn't call this design. I really want to talk about there being these special mechanisms which language is one. Hofmeyer talks about scaffolding, something which supports a given process.
22:22
How am I doing for time? I'm nearly finished. Yeah, okay, I'm nearly finished. Okay, I gave the example of language saying that to get language of a given kind of subtlety, you need a system to support it.
22:41
Now, just as I said earlier in terms of what is significant, you have to view the world in a particular way to acquire language. You have to know how language works, that there are things like words, phrases maybe for human language,
23:01
that there are objects that words connect with. So we have specialized software or mechanisms, as it were, to support the given process. That's another example of what's involved. These basic processes are generic mechanisms.
23:23
Your language-supporting process doesn't tell you which language you get. It can produce an infinite variety of possibilities. Also, we've had this in connection with language. Individuals and communities both develop.
23:41
The way this happens is that you have a system. The system behaves in particular ways, and there's a two-way connection. Systems give rise to activity, then people develop systems that work with activity. This roughly is how you can get a language developing,
24:00
because there's some activity where slight variation can help. And notice, again, we have relationship. The connection between system and activity is quite subtle. Relationships come in. And Hoffmeier mentions he has the stepping stone analogy. You can stay with one system for a time,
24:22
then something new occurs and you develop some new stepping stone. So I've talked about this complicated logic. In the biological case, it's supported both by observation and models. Mind aspect can come in, because mind is a part of this special type of process.
24:45
It fits with Wheeler's ideas that things emerge through observer-partisancy. I just mentioned cymatics. There are experiments where you apply sound waves to water and you get patterns, and this seems to be something very similar. They all fit together like pieces of a universe, like pieces of a jigsaw.
25:03
Now I've condensed this into one sentence. Life, the universe, and everything, involve, in essence, unusually high amplitude, organized, near-critical, fractal, nonlinear fluctuations. And I left out entanglement that should be in there as well. So this is kind of blueprint for new science.
25:21
And this is a lake near here, so I'll stop there. Thank you very much. So we have a few minutes for discussion, and I would like to ask four questions from your side. Please observe there are two microphones,
25:41
one over there and one over there. Please use them. Who wants to start? No, not one. Please. Please speak loudly.
26:05
Well, I'm talking about a biologist helping a physicist. That's a good question, dear. Well, it could be things like entanglements of relevance. We heard this morning that entanglement has developed
26:21
from it being a simple one-to-one thing to something much more universal and topology as well. I could have added topology to my list. So I think there may be close connections between what we're learning about entanglement in physical systems
26:40
and that may be relevant to topology as well. The two probably go very closely together and we'll be able to help each other. Please, over there.
27:13
I have to disagree. Come back in tenuous time and we'll see whether physics has changed more than biology or not.
27:23
Okay. Please. Actually, Karen Barr did work on, focus on sociology.
27:41
She took examples of how things developed in a society and related to this to physics. She has sort of explanations of wave function collapse, what happens in observations and so on.
28:00
Well, it's just that biology has been developing these deep concepts. I haven't been able to go into much detail, but I think biology has a kind of developing kind of picture that physicists will be able to use. And I don't know, sociology will be more ideas, I think, whereas biologists are working on quite rigorous models
28:22
and talking about things like internal development of a system or things where one system influences another. The detail of how language works is something which, I mean, we have a general concept as a computer program by Terry Winograd,
28:47
which programs lots of language systems working together. So in other words, I'm being a physicist by training. My focus is on what seems to be most useful for physics.
29:06
Please. Louder, please.
29:24
I have someone working with me who hopes to be able to show how qubits work together in this sort of way and perhaps get out the laws of physics that we have. I don't know if that's being optimistic
29:40
or what, but he hopes you can apply them. Well, I guess I feel I know these systems well enough to know how you can program. Actually, some 20 years ago, I had a graduate student who,
30:02
unfortunately, his work was blocked by the department because they said this isn't physics. He had done a computer simulation based on a mathematician's idea called hyperstructures and he programmed a system which could learn to balance
30:23
by forming these hyperstructures. I mean, I am fairly well acquainted with the kind of models you can produce, I think, so I believe it will be possible. Well, I don't know how much exploration will be necessary to really fit with quantum mechanics.
30:42
We'll have to see how it goes. Please, over there. Yes? Yeah. Go to the microphone.
31:13
Well, biologists do it. My colleague Greg Winter got a Nobel Prize in Chemistry recently.
31:25
He is busy on making drugs, antibiotics, and not sure exactly what, based on biological predictions, so it can be done. You understand the machinery of life, basically, and so you think this ought to work.
31:43
We have to get the bits to work together in the right way, but you're definitely getting out things which you couldn't without doing the science. The gentleman in the fourth row.
32:25
Maybe a small question of the people changing their approach. You have to say the things that would excite people, but I'm not sure that it would make much difference. There's a quote from Karen Barad which I avoided,
32:40
something like, matter thinks, feels, converses, and so on, but I don't know if that would excite people, and I didn't think it would excite the audience. I think you have to make clear how the role that physics has in the world,
33:02
and maybe scientists are not very good at presenting this very well. Okay, this gentleman. So mathematics is a language that seems to work pretty well to describe the world, but you are suggesting that probably is not enough.
33:22
Do you know exactly what trait of mathematics is limiting our description of the world? Okay, let me first of all say a point I did briefly say earlier, but mathematics seems to describe the world very well because we are very selective
33:40
in what we apply physics to, and measuring particle masses or having, well, you could say that you work with, to apply mathematics you have to work with well-defined systems that are well-defined from the point of view of the physicist, so it's not, it's just leaving out most of the world.
34:03
But it may be that, I know André Ehresmann is trying to apply category theory to it, and that's a less quantitative theory, and it may be one can formalize these ideas and apply mathematics,
34:22
but it will not be the quantitative mathematics. On the other hand, there is, well, I suppose you can even mathematize the fact that something can't be mathematized. I mean, there's the point of Turing that some things are, I'd say someone else made the point, things that are true for no reason, that's a difficulty.
34:42
Biology works with things that are true for no reason, and they were selected because they work, but there's no reason why they work. There's no tidy proof that something works. It just is, survives. Okay, there's time for two or three more questions.
35:02
Please, over there, go to the microphone, please. So do you think that we will ever be able to mathematically model the cell well enough to recreate it? Sorry, mathematically model what was that? Like the cell, the whole cell.
35:22
Oh, yeah. Well, it's a point that Freeman Dyson made, that there's so much variability in biology that you won't be able to model it mathematically. All you can do is what biologists do,
35:41
find the various mechanisms and how they work together. You'll be able to model pieces but not the whole system because of its complexity and variability. Do we have a final question, please? Well, you could put it down to complexity,
36:19
but if complexity suitably defined is bigger
36:23
than the number of characters in your expedition, you can't model it. You can't model a system that's more complex than your explanation. I don't think you can get around that
36:41
as long as complexity, and there are theorems about complexity, so the answer is you can't. It'll have to be done a bit at a time. Okay. Well, is there another question there?
37:18
Yes. Well, some people even suggested that the Higgs boson
37:22
has a mass, had an indefinite mass until we started measuring, and that made it settle down to a particular value. That's always possible. We don't know how much we are influencing the world by experimenting with it. Okay, I think we're now coming to an end.
37:41
The time is over, and I thank you for the large number of nice, very nice questions, but my impression is that biology and physics are still far apart, and one has to work very hard in order to bring them together. This is a good approach, and thank Professor Joseph Negan.
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