“This retroactive idea. It has to be that,” says Nobel Prize-winning mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose (left), reflecting on a problem about the building blocks of reality that has dogged physics for nearly a century. “Any sensible physicist wouldn't be perturbed by this,” he adds. “However, I'm not a sensible physicist.”
If Penrose isn’t a sensible physicist it’s because the laws of physics aren’t making sense, at least not on the subatomic level where the smallest things in the universe play by different rules than everything we see around us. He has reason to believe this disconnect involves a fissure that divides two different kinds of reality. He also has reason to believe that the physical process that bridges these realities will unlock answers to the physics of consciousness: the mystery of our own existence. READ MORE...
A solid is made of atoms that are, more or less, locked in an ordered structure. A liquid, on the other hand, is made of atoms that can flow freely around and past each other. But imagine atoms that stay unfrozen, like those in a liquid–but which are in a constantly changing magnetic mess.
What you have then is a never-before-seen state of matter, a state of quantum weirdness called a quantum spin liquid. Now, by carefully manipulating atoms, researchers have managed to create this state in the laboratory. The researchers published their work in the journal Science on December 2.
Scientists had discussed theories about spin liquids for years. “But we really got very interested in this when these theorists, here at Harvard, finally found a way to actually generate the quantum spin liquids,” says Giulia Semeghini, a physicist and postdoc at Harvard University, who coordinated the research project and was one of the paper authors.
Under extreme conditions not typically found on Earth, the rules of quantum mechanics can twist atoms into all sorts of exotica. Take, for instance, degenerate matter, found in the hearts of dead stars like white dwarfs or neutron stars, where extreme pressures cook atoms into slurries of subatomic particles. Or, for another, the Bose-Einstein condensate, in which multiple atoms at very low temperatures sort of merge together to act as one (its creation won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics). READ MORE...
One of the most important open questions in science is how our consciousness is established.
In the 1990s, long before winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his prediction of black holes, physicist Roger Penrose teamed up with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to propose an ambitious answer.
They claimed that the brain’s neuronal system forms an intricate network and that the consciousness this produces should obey the rules of quantum mechanics – the theory that determines how tiny particles like electrons move around.
This, they argue, could explain the mysterious complexity of human consciousness.
Penrose and Hameroff were met with incredulity. Quantum mechanical laws are usually only found to apply at very low temperatures.
Quantum computers, for example, currently operate at around -272°C. At higher temperatures, classical mechanics takes over. Since our body works at room temperature, you would expect it to be governed by the classical laws of physics.
For this reason, the quantum consciousness theory has been dismissed outright by many scientists – though others are persuaded supporters.
Instead of entering into this debate, I decided to join forces with colleagues from China, led by Professor Xian-Min Jin at Shanghai Jiaotong University, to test some of the principles underpinning the quantum theory of consciousness. READ MORE
