If you don't watch an atom of Carbon 11, it will emit an electron and transform itself into Boron in about 20 minutes. But if you observe it after 1 minute, chances are 95% that it hasn't decayed yet, and the 20 minutes starts all over again. You can observe it much more often, say every second, and then the probability that it has decayed in that time can be infinitesimally small. Curiously--this is a purely quantum effect--frequent observation helps to keep the atom in its metastable C11 state, and can greatly delay the average half-life. This is called the Quantum Zeno Effect (named for the Zeno paradox from the ancient Greek philosopher).
It is only slightly more complicated to use the same principle to guide one quantum state into another. You can demonstrate this easily in a s simple home laboratory setup. If you polarize light with a horizontal polarizing filter, then none of it will get through a second filter that is rotated to be vertical. But if you insert a third filter halfway between the two, and you rotate that filter 45o, then half the originally polarized light gets through the 45o filter, and half of that gets through the final vertical filter. The result looks like magic. You have complete dark at the back end, then you insert another dark filter into the system, and the light coming out the back becomes visibly brighter. You can extend the idea by using a dozen or a hundred different filters between the front (horizontal) and back (vertical) polarizers, with each one rotated just a smidgen compared to the previous one. The result is that you gradually rotate the polarization in many steps, and almost all the light that was horizontally polarized emerges as vertically polarized.
This is called the Inverse Quantum Zeno effect, and it could be used (in principle) to guide complex quantum systems along any desired path. In a brilliant book published 20 years ago, Johnjoe McFadden outlines a way in which the Quantum Zeno effect might be a breakthrough concept in explaining the origin of life and the efficiency of the evolutionary process in general.
If you don't watch an atom of Carbon 11, it will emit an electron and transform itself into Boron in about 20 minutes. But if you observe it after 1 minute, chances are 95% that it hasn't decayed yet, and the 20 minutes starts all over again. You can observe it much more often, say every second, and then the probability that it has decayed in that time can be infinitesimally small. Curiously--this is a purely quantum effect--frequent observation helps to keep the atom in its metastable C11 state, and can greatly delay the average half-life. This is called the Quantum Zeno Effect (named for the Zeno paradox from the ancient Greek philosopher).
It is only slightly more complicated to use the same principle to guide one quantum state into another. You can demonstrate this easily in a simple home laboratory setup. If you polarize light with a horizontal polarizing filter, then none of it will get through a second filter that is rotated to be vertical. But if you insert a third filter halfway between the two, and you rotate that filter 45o, then half the originally polarized light gets through the 45o filter, and half of that gets through the final vertical filter. The result looks like magic. You have complete dark at the back end, then you insert another dark filter into the system, and the light coming out the back becomes visibly brighter. You can extend the idea by using a dozen or a hundred different filters between the front (horizontal) and back (vertical) polarizers, with each one rotated just a smidgen compared to the previous one. The result is that you gradually rotate the polarization in many steps, and almost all the light that was horizontally polarized emerges as vertically polarized.
This is called the Inverse Quantum Zeno effect, and it could be used (in principle) to guide complex quantum systems along any desired path. In a brilliant book published 20 years ago, Johnjoe McFadden outlines a way in which the Quantum Zeno effect might be a breakthrough concept in explaining the origin of life and the efficiency of the evolutionary process in general.
What will our world look like after the coming paradigm shift?
Life is not an opportunistic happenstance that took advantage of a set of arbitrary rules of physics to construct a self-reproducing hypercycle of chemical catalysts, able transform by the laws of chance and competition for resources into a diverse community of "forms most beautiful and wonderful".
Conscious awareness is not an illusion, nor an epiphenomenon that arises whenever a sufficiently sophisticated computational algorithm achieves a threshold of self-reference.
While quantum mechanical equations are well-established, there are conflicting interpretations of what they mean. What is a measurement? And what happens when the wave function collapses. When we take Jahn and Dunne into account, there is a strong preference for the view that consciousness has an independent existence, outside the equations of QM, and that it is conscious observation that collapses the wave function.
Beyond this, anything I say about the coming paradigm will be hubris and foolish speculation. I'm not going to let that stop me.
There is a new science waiting to be formulated that will fundamentally redefine the way we think of our relationship to the universe and to the biosphere. It can only be called "biophysics", though it will have nothing in common with what today is called "biophysics" (=application of known principles of physical chemistry and of fluids to cell structures.) My guess is that the new theory will embrace Cartesian dualism, and bring consciousness into the fold of physics, as a third realm of existence distinct from particles and fields.
Quantum biology is going to grow and morph from a quirky intersection of two largely-independent fields of science, and become our fundamental understanding of what life is. The non-living world is steered and guided loosely by a global Conscious observer or by many competing or reinforcing consciousnesses (small "c"). But a living being has an observer inside who is constantly asking the question of Schrà ¶dinger's cat, "Am I alive or dead?". The Quantum Zeno effect sustains life.
Medical research is going to realize that what we have swept aside as the "placebo effect" is a window into a much richer realm in which the mind influences the body via attention, expectation, and intention. Western medicine based on chemistry will be seen as tapping only half the potential ways in which we can create health and wellness.
The tension will be resolved between Christians who insist that all life is the handiwork of an old man who lives in the sky, and the Darwinian fundamentalists who insist that all evolution from a dilute pool of simple molecules to the diverse biosphere has been the result of chance mutations and a race for the fastest reproducer. Evolution is directed by consciousness through the Quantum Zeno Effect, as Johnjoe McFadden described 20 years ago.
The Life Extension movement and the transhumanist movement will embrace the solid evidence for reincarnation, and for the reality that consciousness is flavored by but not dependent upon a physical brain . Freed from the desperate urgency that derives from belief that death is the end of all, we will continue to pursue life extension, but moved by love of life, rather than fear of death; and we will supplement the tools of biochemistry and regenerative medicine with technologies of the traditional shamans and spiritual masters.
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