Having read, listened to, and watched various material on the multifaceted discipline that science is, I managed to accumulate lots of notes over the years. It is my aim to order all these notes in a logical fashion so they can be used as a springboard for future additions. Of course, trying to classify these different concepts is quite artifcial since they all are related to, or subsets of, each other. Many of these books touch on topics such as psychology, spirituality and even consciousness - hence their inclusion on this page. Philosophical quotations have been relegated to a page already dedicated to this topic - see philosophy of science.

As you see, no mathematics and equations, just trying to come to grips with basic scientific concepts.

At absolute zero, there is a minimum amount of vibration that the atoms can have, but not zero ... Helium merely decreases the atomic motions as much as it can, but even at absolute zero there is still enough motion to keep it from freezing.

R.Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp10

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Our known universe originated 13.7 billion years ago. It is estimated to contain over 100 billion galaxies, each containing several hundred billion stars.

Massive stars only forge elements up to Fe (the first 26) which constitute 99% of all elements on earth. Elements heavier than that are forged in the final death throes of stars 10 times larger than our sun, in supernova explosions - the most powerful explosions in the universe.

These supernovae form rich chemical clouds, the nebulae. The heart of the nebula now contains a little neutron star. Our sun was formed from a nebulae 5 million years ago.

New stars will be formed from the elements blown out by supernovae explosions. The Orion nebula contains molucules such as H2O, formaldehyde, Ether, Methanol, Sulfer Dioxide, Hydrogen Cyanide - complex carbon chemistry in deep space - the beginning of the chemistry of life.

Meteorites originating from the formation of the solar system and found in the Andez Atacama desert contain Amino Acids (the fundamental building blocks of proteins).

91.2% of our Sun is hydrogen. Every second, the sun converts 5 million tons of its mass into energy, converting hydrogen into helium using a process called fusion. The core of the sun comprises half the star's mass though only 2% of its volume. At the core the temperature builds up to 15 million degrees C. The surface temperature is only 5500 degrees C.

Due to the immense pressures, light escapes from the core at a rate of only 1mm/s. Since the distance to the surface is about 500,000 Km, it takes light 200,000 years to travel from the core to the surface, and only 8 minutes to eventually reach our earth!

The diagrams we see of our solar system give us a false impression. All distances are scaled in order to be able to see all the planets. Given some very basic information, it is easy to draw some comparisons, the unit of measure I use here is the smarties chocolate sweet which I'm sure most of us are familiar with. So here goes -

If the Earth were the size of a smarties (13 mm diameter), then

• The Sun would be 150 meters away and have a diameter of 1.4 meters.
• The Moon would be 0.5 meter away.
• Pluto would be 6 km away.

If the sun were the size of a smarties (14 mm diameter) then

• Earth would be 1.5 m away.
• Pluto would be 60 meters away.
• The next star would be 420 km away.

If our galaxy, the Milky Way were the size of a smarties, then

• The next galaxy - M31 - would be 13 cm away
• The entire observable universe would fit within a sphere just 1 km accross.

Other interesting measurements

• The universe is about 15 billion years old.
• There are about 100 billion galaxies in the universe.
• The Milky Way has about a 100 billion bright stars.
• The Milky Way is about 100,000 lightyears accross, 30,000 lightyears thick at the center, and 2600 lightyears thick on the outsides.
• The nearest star is 4.2 lightyears away.
• We can see about 3000 stars with the naked eye.
• The solar system orbits the center of our galaxy at 220 km per second.
• The Earth is 4.5 billion years old.
• The Earth's speed around the sun is 30 km/s.
• The Earth's biosphere is proportional in size to the skin of an apple.
• The Moon's size is 1/4 of the Earth, but 1/80th the Earth's mass.
• Only one five billionth of the sun's light strikes the earth.

Further comments

• Interesting how we say the Earth, the Sun and the Moon, but not the Saturn.
• The Big Bang theory is still in dispute by some eminent scientists, such as John Dobson, the inventor of the Dobsonian telescope. In his words ...
  The Big Bang cosmologists want to get the Universe out of nothing. It's like asking us to believe that nothing made everything out of nothing. But that's not what shows in our physics.
• Since more distant galaxies recede from us at a faster speed (one argument against a 'Big Bang' starting from an origin), we should maybe call this universe the 'observable universe'.
• There is proportionality in the distances within our galaxy, expressed as Bode's Law: Given the distance Sun-Earth (149.6 x 10⁶ km) as x, and a doubling sequence {3, 6, 12, 24, 48, ...}, then each successive distance can be calculated with ((2n + 4)/10)x, where n is each successive number from the series. Read more on this here.

Through a variety of fusion processes, stars build hydrogen into helium; helium into carbon; carbon into oxygen and magnesium, and so forth. Indeed, given that the energy released amounts to but a tiny fraction of the mass being shuffled about, we could say that element making is the primary business of stars, and that their light and heat is but a by-product of that process...

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp272

... the ultimate energy source in the stars which produces the greatest amount of energy is gravity power.

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp280

Speculation about the origin of the universe is an old and notorious human activity; notorious because the cosmogonic [pertaining to the origin and evolution of the universe] speculations that resulted told us more about ourselves than about the universe they claimed to describe.

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp349

The recession velocity of any galaxy we observe is proportional to the galaxy's distance. The more distant the galaxy, the faster it moves away from us. At double the distance, the recession velocity will also double. We observe the furthest galaxies approach the speed of light, and the light from galaxies beyond that distance will never reach us.

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, pp181

So, in accordance with the second law, the orbital speed of each planet is such that the radius "sweeps out" equal areas in equal times.

R. Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp91

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Under proper circumstances any substance can have its mass exploded outwards as energy. A single sheet of paper harnasses an energy that if erupted would cause an explosion greater than that of a large power station.

D. Bodanis: e = mc2

To give an idea on how much stronger electricity is than gravitation, consider 2 grains of sand, a milimeter accross, 30 meters apart. If the force between them were not balanced, if everything attracted everything else instead of likes repelling, so that there were no cancellation, how much force would there be? There would be a force of 3 million tons between the two!

R.Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp4

The law of conservation of energy is a theorem concerning quantities that have to be calculated and added together, with no mention of the machinery, and likewise the great laws of mechanics are quantitative mathematical laws for which no machinery is available. Why can we use mathematics to describe nature without a mechanism behind it? No one knows. We have to keep going because we find out more that way.

However, gravitation and other forces are very similar, and it is interesting to note analogies. For example, the force of electricity between 2 charged objects looks just like the law of gravitation: The force of electricity is a constant, with a minus sing, times the product of the charges, and varies inversely as the square of the distance. It is in the opposite direction - likes repel. But is it still not very remarkable that the 2 laws involve the same function of distance?

If we take, in some natural units, the repulsion of 2 electrons (nature's universal charge) due to electricity, and the attraction of 2 electrons due to their masses, we can measure the ratio of electrical repulsion to the gravitational attraction. The ratio is independent of the distance and is a fundamental constant of nature ... The gravitational attraction relative to the electrical repulsion between 2 electrons is 1 / (4.17 * 10^42). The question is, where does such a large number come from? It is not accidental, like the ratio of the volume of the earth to the volume of a flea. We have considered 2 natural aspects of the same thing, an electron. This fantastic number is a natural constant, so it involves something deep in nature.

R.Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp107

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Magnetism is the force you get when electrons are moving. In a permanent magnet, electricity is flowing all the time, each electron spinning in the same direction.

Berkeley Letters and Science course

As the light beam starts going forward, a little bit of electricity is produced, and as this electricity moves forward it powers up a little bit of magnetism, this in turn powers up another surge of electricity, and so on. The electricity and magnetism keep on leapfrogging over each other in tiny, fast jumps. Maxwell's equations summarizing this insight became known as one of the greatest theoretical achievements of all time.

D. Bodanis: e = mc2

The faster a charge moves through a magnetic field, the stronger the force on this charge.

So what would happen if our object was traveling close to the speed of light and a great amount of energy would be added to it? If the speed can't go over the limit, what happens to the extra energy? Experiments with protons in huge powerful accelerators showed that their mass was increasing! At speeds of 99.9997 percent of the speed of light, the protons ended up 430 times bigger than their original size.

D. Bodanis: e = mc2

Maxwell found that the speed with which electromagnetic fields are propagated is equal to the ratio between the electrical force exerted between two electrical charges when at rest and the magnetic force they exert when in motion. As this turned out to be nothing other than the velocity of light, Maxwell concluded that light itself is an electromagnetic field ... The velocity of light results from a fundamental constant in the equations that describe the behaviour of electromagnetic fields.

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp187

Electromagnetism is the force that holds electrons in their orbits around nuclear particles to make atoms, binds atoms together to form molecules, and ties molecules together to form objects. Every tangible thing, from stars and planets to this page and the eyes that reads it, carries electromagnetism in the fibre of its being.

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp193

Maxwell's equations show that electric fields and magnetic fields cannot exist separately. There is indeed only a combined electromagnetic field with an electric component and a magnetic component at right angles to each other.

In electric phenomena, positive charges and negative charges can exist independently of each other. An object can be either positively charged or negatively charged. In magnetic phenomena, the magnetic poles do not exist separately.

Maxwell showed that from his equations you can demonstrate that an oscillating electric field will produce inevitably an oscillating magnetic field, which will in turn produce another oscillating electric field, and so on indefinitely.

Isaac Asimov: Atom

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I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern, when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me: "If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight". I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation.

Einstein

What is this law of gravitation? It is that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force which for any two bodies is proportional to the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them: F = G((m1.m2)/r^2)

R. Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp89

An object released near the earth's surface will fall 16 feet in the first second. An object shot out horizontally will also fall 16 feet; even though it is moving horizontally, it still falls the same 16 feet in the same time ... What happens if we shoot a bullet faster and faster? Do not forget that the earth's surface is curved. If we shoot it fast enough, then when it falls 16 feet it may be at just the same height above the ground as it was before ... Thus we see that if the bullet moves 5 miles a second, it will then continue to fall toward the earth at the same rate of 16 feet each second, but it will never get any closer because the earth keeps curving away from it.

R. Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp95

[From the first part of the section above, it is an interesting fact that when a ball is dropped while at the same time, and from the same height, a gun fires a bullet horizontally, both the bullet and the ball will reach the ground at the same time].

F = G (m1*m2)/r²

G = 6.670 * 10^-11 Newton * m²/kg²

It is hard to exaggerate the importance of the effect on the history of science produced by this great success of the theory of gravitation. Compare the confusion, the lack of confidence, the incomplete knowledge that prevailed in the earlier ages, when there were endless debates and paradoxes, with the clarity and simplicity of this law - this fact that all the moons and planets and stars have such a simple rule to govern them, and further that man could understand it and deduce how the planets should move! This is the reason for the success of the sciences in following years, for it gave hope that the other phenomena of the world might also have such beautifully simple laws.

R. Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp106

It is a fact that the force of gravitation is proportional to the mass, the quantity which is fundamentally a measure of inertia - of how hard it is to hold something which is going around in a circle. Therefore 2 objects, one heavy and one light, going around a larger object in the same circle at the same speed because of gravity, will stay together because to go in a cirle requires a force which is stronger for a bigger mass. That is, the gravity is stronger for a given mass in "just the right proportion" so that the 2 objects will go around together. If one object were inside the other it would stay inside; it is a perfect balance.

R. Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp111

[The law of gravitation] was modified by Einstein to take into account the theory of relativity. According to Newton, the gravitational effect is instantaneous, that is, if we were to move a mass, we would at once feel a new force because of the new position of that mass; by such means we could send signals at infinite speed. Einstein advanced arguments which suggest that we *cannot send signals faster than the speed of light*, so the law of gravitation must be wrong. By correcting it to take the delays into accout, we have a new law, called Einstein's law of gravitation. One feature of this new law which is quite easy to understand is this: In the Einstein relativity theory, anything which has energy has mass - mass in the sense that it is attracted gravitationally.

R. Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp112

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Refer also to The Atom: Filling the Gaps.

The electron is a little bubble of wave energy. The electron wave can set up paricularly stable standing vibrations (resonance) - this leads to emmision or absorption of electro-magnetic radiation in atoms and molecules. When an electron falls from an outer to an inner orbit it emits a photon. The wavelength of that photon is determined by the particular orbits between which the electron has made the transition. And that is why a spectrum, which records the wavelengths of photons, reveals the chemical elements that make up the stars or other object the spectroscopist is studying.

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp258

The dot over a letter i has many more protons than there are stars in our galaxy. (+100 billion)

The nucleus virtually ties up all the mass of the atom, electrons determine its size.

What happens inside a nucleus is largely independent of what happens to the electrons.

Atomic explosion works by 'rearranging' inside nuclei. Chemical explosion rearranges electrons in their orbits.

In the outer regions of an atom, electrons emit visible light when changing orbit. Inside the nucleus, a proton or neutron making a similar change emits an x-ray with a million times more energy.

The diameter of an atom is approximately 4 . 10^-10 meters.
Roughly 1000 atoms span one wavelength of light.
One milimeter is around 2.5 million wavelengths.

All things are made of atoms - little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.

R.Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp4

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Nothing in physics seems so hopeful to me as the idea that it is possible for a theory to have a very high degree of symmetry which is hidden from us in ordinary life.

Weinberg 1977

Weinberg, Glashow, and Salam had been right; we live in a universe of broken symmetries, where at least two of the fundamental forces of nature, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, have diverged from a single, more symmetrical parent.

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp326

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We observe how the very geometry of our world often produces squares... In fact, almost anything that steadily accumulates will turn out to grow in terms of simple squared numbers.

D. Bodanis: e = mc2

[Mathematics reveals underlying similarities in nature. For example the equation for the attraction between 2 masses is F = G * (m1 * m2)/r² (Newton's law), while the equation for the attraction between 2 charges is F = k * (q1 * q2)/r² (Coulomb's law). The reason why these 2 equations are the same is unknown.]

Mathematical truth is independent of perception and it is a truth of a very peculiar sort, and is concerned only with symbols. Numbers are logical fictions.

Plato

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inertia

... that is the principle of inertia - if something is moving, with nothing touching it and completely undisturbed, it will go on forever, coasting at a uniform speed in a straight line. (Why does it keep on coasting? We do not know, but that's the way it is).

R. Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp93

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rules of thumb

Here's a great general rule to remember the units of force, energy, and power. It builds on the alleged idea that Newton discovered the concept of gravity from observing an apple fall from a tree:

• 1 Newton is roughly equal to the force of Earth's gravity on a small apple.
• 1 Joule is roughly equal to the energy required to lift that apple one meter off the ground.
• 1 Watt is the power required when lifting this apple 1 meter off the ground in 1 second.

Newton's laws of motion

Newton's first 3 laws are so fundamental to physics that it is worthwhile to remember them:

1. Objects move unless some force changes the motion
2. F = m * a
3. Every action produces an equal and opposite reaction

force

Aristotle described force as anything which causes an object to undergo unnatural motion. Newton was able to describe force in more mathematical terms. From Newton's second law: F = m * a (kg * m/s²). The unit of force is the Newton, which is equal to the amount of net force required to accelerate a mass of one kilogram at a rate of one meter per second squared.

energy

basic units

1. The Joule (Newton*m), which roughly equates the energy required to lift an apple 1 meter off the ground.
2. The Calorie (cal). One cal is the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C. One cal equals 4.1858 Joules.
3. The Dietary Calorie = 1000 calories = 1 kilocalorie = 4185.8 Joules.

power

Rate of energy use. in cal/s or joule/s ( or Watt).

1 Horse Power is somewhat less than 1 kW (746 Watts).

Sunlight delivers power at a rate of 1kW/m². Current commercial solar cells have an efficiency of around 10%, while NASA's solar cells have a 50% efficiency.

The amount of energy a substance contains per gram can be surprising:

• bullet: 0.01 cal/g
• computer battery: 0.1 cal/g
• TNT: 0.65 cal/g
• Choc cookie: 5 cal/g
• Coal: 6 cal/g
• Fuel: 10 cal/g
• Natural gas: 13 cal/g

Note that TNT is powerful not because the potential energy it contains but because of the fact that it can release this energy in a very short time (Nitrogen reactions). Its rate of energy release (power) is high.

We saw that the average human needs about 2000 dietary calories a day. This equates to 8,371,600 Joules per day, which is 8,371,600 Joules per 86400 seconds. Which is 96.9 Watt. That is the energy needed to keep the body alive. As a comparison, the average human in the developed world consumes about 11,000 W!

Half an hour of exhaustive exercise equates to one can of coke.

Jean B.J.Fourier (Eighteenth century Frenchman) ... developed a mathematical way of converting any pattern, no matter how complex, into a language of simple waves. He also showed how these waveforms could be converted into the original pattern. The equations he developed to convert images into wave forms and back again are known as Fourier transforms.

M. Talbot: The Holographic Universe, 27

Particles moving in wave patterns do not exist in nature. In a water wave, for example, the water particles do not move along with the wave but move in circles as the wave passes by. Similarly, the air particles in a sound wave merely oscillate back and forth, but do not propagate along with the wave. What is transported along the wave is the disturbance causing the wave phenomenon, but not any material particle.

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, p137

TRANSVERSE waves: Water waves spread outward, and the particles of water move up and down in a direction perpendicular to the direction in which the wave progresses.
LONGITUDINAL waves: Sound waves also spread outward,but the particles of air move parallel with the direction in which the waves progress.

Isaac Asimov: Atom

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Electrons and all other particles are no more substantive or permanent than the form a geyser of water takes as it gushes out of a fountain. They are sustained by a constant influx from the implicate order, and when a particle appears to be destroyed, it is not lost. It has merely enfolded back into the deeper order from which it sprang.

M. Talbot: The Holographic Universe, pp43

... A particle can only be defined in terms of its connections to the whole, and these connections are of a statistical nature - probabilities rather than certainties.

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, p144

The electromagnetic field can manifest itself as a free field in the form of travelling waves / photons, or it can play the role of a field of force between charged particles. In the latter case, the force manifests itself as the exchange of photons between the interacting particles. The electric repulsion between two electrons, for example, is mediated through these photon exchanges.

Neither of the two electrons feels a force when they approach each other. All they do is interact with the exchanged photons. The repulsive force is nothing but the collective macroscopic effect of these multiple photon exchanges.

... According to quantum field theory, all interactions take place through the exchange of particles. In the case of electromagnetic interactions, the exchanged particles are photons; nucleons, on the other hand, interact through the much stronger nuclear force which manifests itself as the exchange of a new kind of particles called "mesons".

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, p202

Bosons

In particle physics, bosons are particles which obey Bose-Einstein statistics; they are named after Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein. In contrast to fermions, which obey Fermi-Dirac statistics, several bosons can occupy the same quantum state. Thus, bosons with the same energy can occupy the same place in space. Therefore bosons are often force carrier particles while fermions are usually associated with matter, though the distinction between the two concepts is not clear cut in quantum physics.

All observed elementary particles are either fermions or bosons. The observed elementary bosons are all gauge bosons: photons, W and Z bosons and gluons.

• Photons are the force carriers of the electromagnetic field.
• W and Z bosons are the force carriers which mediate the weak nuclear force.
• Gluons are the fundamental force carriers underlying the strong nuclear force.

In addition, the standard model postulates the existence of Higgs bosons, which give other particles their mass via the Higgs mechanism.

Finally, many approaches to quantum gravity postulate a force carrier for gravity, the graviton, which is a boson of spin 2.

One boson in a state can stimulate or induce another boson into the same state, causing a quantum event (eg. an atomic transition).

A splendid light has dawned on me about the absorption and emission of radiation...

Albert Einstein, letter to Michele Angelo Besso November 1916

What Einstein had realized is that light shined on an atom which is in an excited state can induce the atom to make a downward transition (emitting a photon) if the incoming light's frequency matches the atomic transition energy. The incoming photon is a boson, and for this reason it stimulates the emission of a second photon in the same state, inducing an atomic transition. (Otherwise the "spontaneous emission" would happen randomly.)
Thus, in stimulated emission we have an example of "quantum causality." This process combined with reflection can yield many photons in the same state: coherent light. Stimulated emission underlies the laser.

Consciousness is in its essence relational and it can only arise where at least 2 things come together. ... our human consciousness is only different in degree and complexity with more elementary life forms or with elementary matter. .. Bosons are particles of relationship. Their wave functions can overlap to such degree that they merge totally.

Danah Zohar: The Quantum Self (pp86)

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Light follows a path along which the time taken is a minimum.

C stands for CELERITAS which is latin for swiftness.

What's hard to comprehend about light is that an object traveling close to the speed of light and emitting a light beam will observe this light beam ahead still at the full speed of C.

The photon, having no charge, is its own antiparticle. Pairs of electrons and positrons can be created spontaneously by photons, and can be made to turn into photons in the reverse process of annihilation.

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, p168

About 50 atoms can be placed end to end along a single wavelength of light.

Isaac Asimov: Atom

[According to my calculations this should be more in the order of 1000 atoms. Also, it takes about 2.5 million wavelengths to traverse 1 mm of distance.]

It takes only 5 or 6 photons to activate a nerve cell via the human eye and pass a message to the brain. If we could see 10 times more sensitively, then we would see very dim light of a particular colour as a series of intermittent little flashes of equal intensity.

The energy of an atom is precisely related to its wavelength. An atom absorbing a photon provides energy for an electron to move to an orbit further away from the nucleus. When an electrom falls into the old orbit, it emits a photon with the same energy - the energy corresponding to the gap between the orbits.

Note that the light you see 'reflected' doesn't consist of the same photons that reached the object in the first place.

Each element is capable of generating only photons of a few specific frequencies (colours), hence it has a unique spectrum.

When we look at photons on a large scale, the rules are approximated by Light travels in straight lines. But when the space becomes small, such as the pinholes in the double slit experiment, those rules fail. The same holds true for electrons; on a large scale they travel like particles on definite paths, but on a small scale, such as inside an atom, there is no main path - and interference reins.

R. Feynman

Space and time are not constants. Time slows down near the speed of light. Speed of light is the true constant.

A body radiates energy not in a continuous stream, but in discrete bundles called quanta. Each of these bundles of energy carries the amount of energy that is a multiple of its frequency. The higher the frequency, the higher the energy. The equation for calculating the energy of a bundle of, say, light from its frequency is called Planck's Law. The constant that accomplishes the conversion is Planck's Constant. Einstein extended this idea for light, whose discrete bundles could knock electrons out of a metal - calling the light quanta photons. However the term photon is often extended to comprise any quanta of the electro-magnetic spectrum.

A wavelength of light is around 4 . 10^-7 meters. 1 milimeter contains roughly 2.5 million wavelengths.

If you are a photon, traveling at the speed of light, then it's true that you sense no passage of time; everything becomes simultaneous.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

Photons carry energy in proportion to their frequency.

Photons came about, at the turn of the 19th century, as a consequence of the German physicist Max Planck's solution to a difficult puzzle presented by classical physics: the black body radiation.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

Green light will expel electrons from a piece of sodium metal, but to knock electrons out of more common metals, such as copper or aluminium, you need to go to more energetic ultraviolet light. Moreover, it was found that, once electron liberation has begun, turning up the intensity of the light increases the number but not the energy of the electrons that are popped out, while turning up the frequency of the light brings out electrons of higher individual energy, but at the same rate as before. These facts are hard to understand using a wave theory of light, in which the energy carried by waves is a product of the frequency and the intensity.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

What is this *zero mass*? The masses given here are the masses of the particles at *rest*. The fact that a particle has zero mass means, in a way, that it cannot be at rest. A photon is never at rest, it is always moving at 186,000 miles a second.

R.Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp43

You may have heard that photons come out in blobs and that the energy of a photon is Planck's constant times the frequency. That is true, but since the frequency of light can be anything, there is no law that says that energy has to be a certain definite amount.

R.Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp84

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Bohm's analogy to space / matter separation:
A crystal cooled to absolute zero will allow a stream of electrons to pass through it without scattering them. If the temperature is raised, various flaws in the crystal will lose their transparency, and begin to scatter electrons. From an electron's point of view such flaws would appear as pieces of matter floating in a sea of nothingness. But this is not really the case, they are both part of the same fabric, the deeper order of the crystal.

Bohm

When two particles collide with high energies, they generally break into pieces, but these pieces are not smaller than the original particles. They are again particles of the same kind and are created out of the energy of motion (kinetic energy) involved in the collision process. The whole problem of dividing matter is thus resolved in an unexpected sense...[because] this way we can divide matter again and again.

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, pp67

The inertia of a material object - the object's resistance against being accelerated - is not an intrinsic property of matter, but a measure of its interaction with all the rest of the universe.

Ernest Mach

Momentum is conserved, so momentum rather than speed is the important quantity.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

Plasma is the 4th manifestation of matter after solids, liquids, and gasses. It consists of super-heated gas which becomes ionized.

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Mind and matter are different aspects of the same reality. What we call "matter" is the aspect we apprehend when we look at a person, a plant, or a molecule from the outside; "mind" is the aspect we obtain when we look at the same thing from the inside.

Ervin Laszlo: Science and the Akashic field

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What is an electric field? We don't know. When we discover a new kind of field it seems mysterious. Then we name it, get used to dealing with it and describing its properties, and it no longer seems mysterious. But we still do not know what an electric or a gravitational field really is.

Bohm

Faraday and Maxwell found it more appropriate to say that each charge creates a disturbance, or a condition, in the space around it so that the other charge, when it is present, feels a force. This condition in space which has the potential of producing a force is called a field. It is created by a single charge and it exists whether or not another charge is brought in to feel its effect.

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, pp47

Electric fields are created by charged bodies and their effects can only be felt by charged bodies. Magnetic fields are produced by charges in motion, i.e., by electric currents, and the magnetic forces resulting from them can be felt by other moving charges.

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, pp193

Since all motion is relative, every charge can also appear as a current - in a frame of reference where it moves with respect to the observer - and consequently, its electric field can also appear as a magnetic field. In the relativistic formulation of electrodynamics, the two fields are thus unified into a single electromagnetic field.

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, pp194

The existence of the positive charge, in some sense, distorts, or creates a "condition" in space so that when we put the negative charge in, it feels a force. This potentiality for producing a force is called an electric field.
... If we were to charge a body, say a comb, electrically and then place a charged piece of paper at a distance and move the comb back and forth, the paper will respond by always pointing to the comb. If we shake it faster, it will be discovered that the paper is a little behind, there is a DELAY in the action
...Charges make a field and charges in fields have forces on them and move.

R.Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp30

Here is an analogy. If we are in a pool of water and there is a floating cork very close by, we can move it directly by pushing the water with another cork. If you looked only at the 2 corks, all you would see would be that one moved immediately in response to the motion of the other - there is some kind of interaction between them. Of course what we really do is disturb the water, the water then disturbs the other cork. We could make up a "law" that if you pushed the water a little bit, an object close by in the water would move. If it were farther away, of course, the second cork would scarcely move, for we move the water *locally*. On the other hand, if we jiggle the cork, a new phenomenon is involved, in which the motion of the water moves the water there, etc ., and *waves* travel away, so that by jiggling, there is an influence *very much farther out*, an oscillatory influence, that cannot be understood from the direct interaction. Therefore the idea of direct interaction must be replaced with the existence of the water, or in the electrical case, with what we call the *electromagnetic field*.

R.Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp31

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Atoms, like electrons, can be scattered, and can create interference patterns, Just recently a version of the two-split expreriment was done with atoms instead of photons, and the appropriate interference pattern emerged.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

There is no interaction of any kind between the photons in the two-split experiment. they are always alone.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

Photons arrive at the screen of a two-split experiment, having traveled through empty space, whith as much energy as they had in the first place.

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Planck units are units of measurement named after the German physicist Max Planck, who first proposed them in 1899. They are an example of natural units, i.e. units of measurement designed so that certain fundamental physical constants are normalized to 1. In Planck units, the constants thus normalized are:

• the gravitational constant, G;
• The reduced Planck constant, h;
• the speed of light in a vacuum, c;
• the Coulomb force constant, k;
• Boltzmann's constant, kB (or simply k).

For a little mathematical tour on the relationship between Planck's constants and the Gravitational constant, see Relationship between Planck's Constants and the Gravitational Constant.

The Planck length is the scale at which classical ideas about gravity and space-time cease to be valid, and quantum effects dominate. This is the 'Quantum of Length', the smallest measurement of length with any meaning. It is roughly equal to 1.6 x 10^-35 m or about 10^-20 times the size of a proton.

The Planck time is the time it would take a photon travelling at the speed of light to across a distance equal to the Planck length. This is the 'Quantum of Time', the smallest measurement of time that has any meaning, and is equal to 10^-43 seconds. No smaller division of time has any meaning.

The energy E contained in a photon, which represents the smallest possible 'packet' of energy in an electromagnetic wave, is directly proportional to the frequency f according to the following equation:

E = hf

If E is given in joules and f is given in hertz (the unit measure of frequency), then:

E = (6.626176 x 10^-34) f

and conversely:

f = E / (6.626176 x 10^-34)

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Physicists could not find any way to figure out how a fixed amount of energy would be shared among these infinite possibilities (infinite harmonics) in such a way as to arrive at a meaningful average energy per wave which could be thought of as the temperature.
Planck suggested that each electromagnetic wave could carry energy only in multiples of a basic amount proportional to its frequency, so that the energy in any individual wave was a whole number times the frequency of that wave, multiplied by a conversion factor that came to be knowns as Planck's constant.
For waves at very high frequency (the zillionth harmonic) the minimum unit of energy became so large that it exceeded all the energy in the heated box, which meant that very high frequency oscillations never arose. Planck's quantization of energy meant that the available number of oscillations in a box became finite.
This unit, this quantity of energy, this division into little packets, was a new idea in physics. And so the photon was born.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

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There are 2 aspects to quantum physics; in a sense it's a bit like dice. There are 2 aspects to dice. There are the individual dice events that occur, and then there are the statistical patterns - like a lot of sevens will occur and not many twelves. Bell's theorem shows that none of these patterns are ever connected faster than light; you will never see a faster than light pattern. But the individual events, the dice falls themselves, must be tight together faster than light.

Nick Herbert: Consciousness and Quantum Reality (interview - Thinking Allowed Productions)

Here's a great analogy for understanding the quantum world. It's taken from Where does the weirdness go? from David Lindley - ISBN 0-09-974751-0
Imagine a pair of gloves, each of which is packed in a sealed box. Each box is then sent with a person to opposite sides of the globe, say France and Australia. First consider the normal state of affairs in the macro world we live in. Assuming you don't know which glove is in your packet - you only can find out when you open it - then you also know the other's glove.
Now consider the quantum gloves. The difference here is that the glove in each packet is neither RH nor LH before someone actually opens a packet. If person A opens it up in Australia, there's a 50/50 change that it is either R or L - and it will also determine the state of the other glove. Trouble is that you can't tell if the other one already had opened it and finalised the state of your glove before you opened it. If you wanted to find out, you would have to phone her - and there you are limeted by the speed of light. In other words, and this is crucial, when one person opens up the parcel, the other one becomes realised as well INSTANTANEOUSLY, but to actually find out what happened you're limited by the speed of light.

In quantum , measurement is an act by which the measurer and the measured interact to produce a result. It's not simply the determination of a preexisting property ... Rather, the system is indeterminate until the measurement is made.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

In classical applications, probabilities are a cover for ignorance - acquiring more data can make steadily more accurate predictions. Predictions in quantum mechanics are probabilistic not because of insufficient information or understanding, but because the theory itself has nothing more to say.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

The raw material of quantum mechanics - the formulas and equations, deviced throught the collective efforts of many physicists and preserved within the pages of numerous textbooks - is not the topic disagreement. The theory is rigorous and exact; physicists know how to use it, and don't argue about the predictions it makes. ... but physicists still cannot honestly say what the theory means.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

No elementary phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is a measured phenomenon.

John Wheeler

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No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.

Bell's Theorem has been described as the 'most profound discovery of science' (not just physics) and many people seem to agree. This theory basically proves that reality is non-local and thus validates Schrodinger's notion of 'entanglement', i.e. when 2 quantum systems meet and then separate, they still remain connected somehow, even when they are lightyears apart.

A good starting point is Gary Felder's article Spooky Action at a Distance.

A more detailed description can be found at the University of Toronto - a particularly enlightening one.

Alain Aspect, of the university of Paris, was the first to provide an unambiguous practical test of Bell's theorem.

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The wavefunction is a mathematical device that allows you to figure out the correct probability for the photon hitting the screen at any place you choose (Thomas Young's double split experiment (1801)).

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

Wavefunctions are what we use to predict the results of measurements, and measurements are the way we build up knowledge of the world ... A wavefunction describes a system - the thing being measured and the measurement being made - rather than being an independent description only of the thing being measured.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

What was initially a half-up, half-down electron becomes simply an up electron. After any such measurement, the wavefunction becomes less expansive or capacious than it was. Hence the name "collapse" or "reduction" of the wavefunction.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

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String theory postulates that there exists and has existed only a single variety of particle, but that this particle has an infinite number of manifestations - as in the innumerable tunes that may be composed on a single string of Pythagoras's lyre. Thus a single supersymmetric variety of particle shows up in various harmonics as gravitons and gravitini, quarks and squarks, photons and photinos, and so forth. Since, as Gell-Mann noted, "these infinitely many particles all obey a single very beautiful master equation," the theory suggests how maximum complexity could have arisen from maximum simplicity.

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp347

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The most important thing to keep in mind about Einstein's universe is the fantastic stiffness of space - of the rubber sheet if you like...space is 1032 times stiffer than steel...In other words, the enormous but not infinite stiffness of Einstein's space-time tells us that, while space is not infinitely rigid, it is very, very rigid. In fact, odd as it sounds, space is the most rigid stuff in the universe.

Blair

Space is merely a system of relations

Leibniz

Since Einstein, distance is between events, not between things, and thus involves time as well as space. This modern view can not be stated except in terms of differential equations.

Russell

The direction of time is determined by the second law of thermodynamics which states that isolated macroscopic systems never change from low entropy (ordered state) to high entropy (disordered state). Even though there is no scientific reason that it shouldn't go the other way (high to low entropy), the probability of it occuring is so low that it is negligable.

A classic example that is often used to illustrate this principle is a sand pile on the beach that can exist in many states (high entropy, high probability that random physical forces can create similar piles) as opposed to a sand sculpture shaped with a child's beach bucket which has low entropy, there is a very low probability that a similar shape can be constructed by random physical forces.

This change from low to high entropy determines the direction of time. If the somewhat depressing theory of a Heat Death Universe is correct, all time should stop at the end of the universe's lifespan, since there will be no more movement from low to high entropy.

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... holograms also possess a fantastic capacity for information storage. By changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. Any image thus recorded can be retrieved simply by illuminating the film with a laser beam possessing the same angle as the original two beams. By employing this method researchers have calculated that a one-inch-square of film can store the same amount of information contained in 50 bibles.

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The dripping tap whose intervals are timed reveals a graph that shows an infinite order. Successively zooming into the graph will produce likewise pattens.

A curve can twist in such a complex way that it fills a plane. The dimension is fractional between 1 (a line) and 2 (a surface).

An attractor is a region of space, called phase space, which exerts a magnetic appeal for a system, seemingly pulling the system towards it.

I have dedicated a whole page on chaos in Literature on Chaos.

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Active role of consciousness experiment
People volunteer to have electrical signals recorded at a point on their heads (EEG's). They were asked to flex their right index finger suddenly at various times entirely of their own choosing. What is found is that there is a gradual build-up of recorded electric potential for a full second, or perhaps even up to a second and a half, before the finger is actually flexed. This seems to indicate that the conscious decision process takes over a second in order to act! This may be in contrasted with the much shorter time that it takes to respond to an external signal.

Passive role of consciousness experiment
Patients undergoing brain surgery consented to having electrodes placed at points in their somatosensory cortex. When a stimulus was applied to the skin of these patients, it took about half a second before they were consciously aware of that stimulus, though the patients were not aware of the delay. Touching the corresponding point in the cortex only revealed sensation if touched for more than half a second. Now suppose that the skin is first touched, and then the point in the somatosensory cortex is electrically stimulated about a quarter second after the touching of the skin. The skin touching will not be felt at all. This is backwards masking... The conscious perception can be prevented by a later event, provided that the event occurs within about half a second. This tells us that the conscious awareness of such a sensation occurs at something like half a second after the actual event producing that sensation. It would appear that half a second must elapse before consciousness is called in to play; and then well over a second before one's 'willed' response can take effect. ... Perhaps consciousness is, after all, merely a spectator who experiences nothing but an 'action replay' of the whole drama.

R. Penrose: The Emperor's new mind, pp568-569

Consciousness is, after all, the one phenomenon that we know of, according to which time needs to flow at all! The way in which time is treated in modern physics is not essentially different from the way in which space is treated. Yet, according to our perceptions, time does flow...

R. Penrose: The Emperor's new mind, pp574

Bohm believes that consciousness is a more subtle form of matter, and the basis for any relationship between the two lies not in our own level of reality, but deep in the implicate order. Consciousness is present in various degrees of enfoldment and unfoldment in all matter, which is perhaps why plasmas possess some of the traits of living things.

M. Talbot: The Holographic Universe, pp50

There's no theatre; there's no Cartesian theatre where everything comes together for consciousness. There's this great competition going on, all the time, between information, sensory information and the different sense modalities, and lots of this is being put together and analysed by what we might as well call for the moment 'sub-conscious' mechanisms, and it's all vying for influence in the brain. And the stuff that succeeds in gaining and holding influence for some time, long enough so that you can talk about it later, that's what we're conscious of. It's only retrospectively that we can identify what we were conscious of.

Prof Daniel C. Dennett: Australian ABC radio broadcast 'The Philosopher's Zone', Saturday 26 Nov 2011

For billions of years there was no free will on this planet. Now there is. What has changed is that evolution has created nervous systems that have more and more power. And that access of power, that capacity to look ahead, that capacity to reflect, that capacity to respond to reasons, to give and respond to reasons, those capacities are the core of moral responsibility. And we're the only creatures that have them. And it evolved, and once it evolved-ta-da!-we have entities that have tremendous power, cognitive power, and that's what free will is. So it's sort of noblesse oblige: Those of us who have the powers are obliged to use them wisely.

Prof Daniel C. Dennett: Australian ABC radio broadcast 'The Philosopher's Zone', Saturday 26 Nov 2011

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A human brain has around 10¹¹ neurons and 10¹⁵ synapses.

It was known that the electrical communications that take place between the brain's nerve cells, or neurons, do not occur alone. Neurons possess branches like little trees, and when an electrical message reaches the end of one of these branches it radiates outward as does the ripple in a pond.

M. Talbot: The Holographic Universe, pp20

We possess Transference of learned skills, i.e. we can write words with our left elbow.

On the brain and hallucination
Konorski conceived of a dynamical system which, he wrote, "can generate perceptions, images and hallucinations ... the mechanism producing hallucinations is built into our brains, but it can be thrown into operation only in some exceptional conditions." Konorski brought together evidence - weak in the 1960s, but overwhelming now - that there are not only afferent connections going from the sense organs to the brain, but 'retro' connections going in the other direction. They provide, Konorski felt, the essential anatomical and physiological means by which hallicunations can be generated.
What then normally prevents this from happening? The crucial factor, Konorski suggested, is the sensory input from the eyes, ears and other sense organs, which normally inhibits any backflow of activity from the highest parts of the cortex to the periphery. But if there is a critical deficiency of input from the sense organs, this will facilitate a backflow, producing hallicunations physiologically and subjectively indistinguishable from perceptions. (There is normally no such reduction of input in conditions of silence or darkness because "off-units" fire up and produce continuous activity).

Oliver Sacks: Musicophelia, pp77

On brain cell loss

Most estimates say we have about 100 billion brain cells (neurons), and about ten times that many, or one trillion, support cells (glia) that help the neurons. We'll just concentrate on the neurons themselves.

The brain weighs about 3 pounds, and after age 20, you lose about a gram of brain mass per year. So if the brain weighs 1400 grams and there are about 100 billion neurons, that comes to about 70 million neurons per gram. Now we could stop here and say that we lose 70 million neurons a year, or about 190,000 per day, but that wouldn't really be right. That's because most of that gram isn't really neurons dying. Some of that loss is glia (support cells) dying, some of it is because the neurons are shrinking but not dying, and some of it is that the neurons lose some of their insulation (myelin), which makes them slower, but doesn't cause them to die.

Even if we say that only 5% of the gram is neurons actually dying, we get neuron loss of about 9,000 neurons a day!

A side note: This is all assuming you're a person who takes care of yourself. But there are lots of things people do that cause much higher rates of brain cell death. The big one is using certain drugs. Not all drugs cause brain cells to die, but the ones that do are very damaging. Ketamine, nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and volatile inhalants (glue, gasoline, paint thinner) can cause brain cell death at THIRTY TIMES normal rates - that's almost 300,000 neurons a day! And alcohol also increases the rate of brain cell death, but less than the others.

In their study of nerves, the biologists have come to the conclusion that nerves are very fine tubes with a complex wall which is very thin; through this wall the cell pumps ions, so that there are positive ions on the outside and negative ions on the inside, like a capacitor. Now this membrane has an interesting property; if it "discharges" in one place, i.e., if some of the ions were able to move through one place, so that the electrical voltage is reduced there, that electrical influence makes itself felt on the ions in the neighborhood, and it affects the membrane in such a way that it lets the ions through at neighboring points also. This in turn affects it farther along, etc., and so there is a wave of *penetrability* of the membrane which runs down the fibers when it is "excited" at one end by stepping on the sharp stone. This wave is somewhat analogous to a long sequence of vertical dominoes; if the end one is pushed over, that one pushes the next, etc. Of course, this will transmit only one message unless the dominoes are set up again, and similarly in the nerve cell, there are processes which pump the ions slowly out again, to get the nerve ready for the next impulse.

... when the impulse reaches the end of the nerve, little packets of a chemical called acetylcholine are shot off (5 or 10 molecules at a time) and they affect the muscle fiber and make it contract ...

R.Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp50

Left and Right side of the brain

Patients that suffer from epilepsy sometimes have their L/R Brain connection surgically 'split' in order to prevent seizures. Testing some of these patients suggests a kind of independent 'consciousness' for each half of the brain:

• L side of the brain regulates the R side of the senses (R eye, ...)
• R side regulates the L side of the senses.

An object was shown to the R eye only and the patient remarked that he could see it. But when it was shown to the L eye only, he remarked he couldn't see it, though nevertheless he could grab the said object from a multitude of other objects.

The right brain saw the object but couldn't interpret it. This is done by the L Brain which is the interpreter. The Left brain doesn't know why the Left hand (eye) is doing something - but tries to explain it in its ongoing narative.

This often leads to the curious situation where the interpreting is done after the fact - so it reverts forwards in time.

This suggests 2 separate systems of consciousness. The Left hemisphere's job is to tell the story → origin of false beliefs. the Right hemisphere has language but no syntax, e.g. it doesn't know the difference between a venetian blind and a blind venetian. It is very good at say, detecting a peeler in a draw of cutlery.

Dr Jill Bolte Taylor gives a most intriguing insight into the brain by describing her experiences after suffering a stroke in her left hemisphere in one of her video talks. She compares the 2 hemispheres with computer processors:

• The left side is the serial processor that takes care of past, future, language. The I am separation.
• The right side is the parallel processor that handles the here and now.

Plasticity

When we think and learn, we change the connection between the nerve cells. Freud, who really was a neurologist rather than a psychiatrist, called this "the law of association by simultaneity". Neurons that fire together, wire together. And neurons that fire apart, wire apart.

Synapses

Well it has been said that the number of synapses in the human brain is about a million billion. But something we've discovered about the molecular composition of the synapses is that they have over 1,000 different proteins within this.

Seth Grant - 'All in the Mind' ABC radio - 3 December 2011

If you were looking at a synapse and imagining yourself down inside the synapse amongst all of the molecules you would see what you might call molecular machines, large sets of proteins the sort of components which assembled together make these large molecular machines. But what is the extraordinary thing about these molecular machines which would look like large sort of blobs of molecules is that they're actually like computers, they're information processors, they handle all of the information that comes from the animal's environment, they convert it into chemical signals and they process that information in very complex and specialised ways. Everything we hear, see, taste, touch and smell is converted into these kinds of digital electrical codes and the synapse will pass that information from one nerve cell to the next, which then passes it to another nerve cell and the next and in that way the information is transported around the nervous system. But the specialised thing about the synapses is they don't just transmit the information, they listen to the information sort of like the spy agency that listens to your phone calls, it listens to that information as it goes past. And then responds and does things with it and one of the most extraordinary and important things it does it allows that information to be written down and stored in the form of memories. And this is really a key function which synapses do.

Seth Grant - 'All in the Mind' ABC radio - 3 December 2011

Well that's right, in fact the brain is all about the chemistry and it is, as far as electrical transmission and chemical transmission of information is concerned, it's at synapses where the electrical information is turned into chemical information, the chemicals are squirted across the synaptic cleft. These are called neuro transmitters and those neuro transmitters then stimulate and activate the electrical activity in the next nerve cell.

Seth Grant - 'All in the Mind' ABC radio - 3 December 2011

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Swedenborg, mystic born in1688, was the Leonardo Da Vinci of his era. He was the leading mathematician in Sweden, and spoke 9 languages...Throughout all of this he meditated regularly, and when he reached middle age, developed the ability to enter deep trances during which he left his body and visited what appeared to him to be heaven...The German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote an entire book on Swedenborg, entitled Dreams of a Spirit - Seer. According to Swedenborg, the information that arose during the opening of the Book of Lives was recorded in the nervous system of the person's spiritual body. Thus, in order to evoke the life review an "angel" had to examine the individual's entire body "beginning with the fingers of each hand, and proceeding through the whole." ... Dole, who holds degrees from Yale, Oxford, and Harvard, notes that one of the most basic tenets of Swedenborg's thinking is that our universe is constantly created and sustained by two wavelike flows, one from heaven and one coming from our own soul or spirit. "If we put these images together, the resemblance to the hologram is striking," says Sole, "We are constituted by the intersection of two flows - one direct, from the divine, and one indirect, from the divine via our environment. We can view ourselves as interference patterns, because the inflow is a wave phenomenon, and we are where the waves meet."

M. Talbot: The Holographic Universe, pp257

Sri Aurobindo [born 1872 a thinker, political activist, Yogic teacher, and mystic whom Indians revere alongside Gandhi...]. Through meditation, he eventually learned to become, in his own words, "an explorer of the planes of consciousness." One of his most intractable obstacles he had to overcome was to learn how to silence the endless chatter of words and thoughts...To plumb the subtler and more implicate regions of the psyche does indeed require a Bohmian shift of attention. ...

"We fragment things because we exist at a lower vibration of consciousness and reality", says Aurobindo, and it is our propensity [tendency] for fragmentation that keeps us from experiencing the intensity of consciousness, joy, love and delight for existence that are the norm in these higher and more subtle realms.

Just as Bohm believes that it is not possible for disorder to exist in a universe that is ultimately unbroken and whole, Sri Aurobindo believed that the same was true of consciousness ...

But if the cosmos is ultimately ineffable [beyond words], a farrago [mixture of different things] of multicoloured vibrations, what are all the forms we perceive? What is physical reality? It is, said Sri Aurobindo, just "a mass of stable light."

M. Talbot: The Holographic Universe, pp264

We must not only cut asunder the snare of the mind and the senses, but flee also from the snare of the thinker, the snare of the theologian and the church-builder, the meshes of the Word and the bondage of the Idea. All these are within us waiting to wall in the spirit with forms; but we must always go beyond, always renounce the lesser for the greater, the Finite for the Infinite; we must be prepared to proceed from illumination to illumination, from experience to experience, from soul-state to soul-state...Nor must we attach ourselves even to the truths we hold most securely, for they are but forms and expressions of the Ineffable [too great for words] who refuses to limit itself to any form or expression.

Sri Aurobindo

Non-action does not mean doing nothing and keeping silent. Let everything be allowed to do what it naturally does, so that its nature will be satisfied.

Cuang-tzu

Zen, being Buddhistic in its essence, is a unique blend of the philosophies and idiosyncrasies of three different cultures. It is a way of life which is typically Japanese, and yet it reflects the mysticism of India, the Taoists' love of naturalness and spontaneity and the thorough pragmatism of the Confucian mind.

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, pp108

Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

Alan Watts

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It is surprising how so many text books seem to mystify this concept. It is easy to understand once you know the basic constituents of the atom: the protons, neutrons and electrons.

Avogadro's number relates the mass of a substance to the number of particles (atoms, molecules, etc) it has. It is a huge number: 6.022 x 10²³, also referred to as a Mole. A Mole of rice grains would cover the land area of the world to a depth of 75 meters.

1. All protons have the same mass, so do all the neutrons. The electron's mass is negligable. Since both protons and neutrons are located in the nucleus, all the mass of an atom resides in its nucleus.
   • Mass of proton : 1,6726 x 10^-24 g
   • Mass of neutron: 1,6749 x 10^-24 g
   • Mass of electron: 0,00091 x 10^-24 g
   • So the ratio of electron to proton is 1/1840, roughly the difference between a paperclip and a 2 ton truck.
2. It is the number of protons that determine the type of element. The atomic mass of an element is given in the periodic table. It is the total number of protons and neutrons in that atom. It is also called the Mass Number.
   • Not to be confused with the Atomic Number, which only gives the number of protons.
   • It is not a round number since it gives a medium (means) to allow for the isotopes (isotopes have the same number of protons but different number of neutrons).
3. Each proton or neutron constitutes 1 Atomic Mass Unit (AMU)
4. Avogadro determined that 1 gram of any substance contains Avogadro's number of AMU. That is, each gram of any substance contains Avogadro's number protons and neutrons.
5. When a substance contains Avogadro's number of anything (not just protons or neutrons, as we shall later see), we say that it contains 1 Mole of that substance.

Examples

1. From the Periodic table we can see that Iron (Fe) has an atomic mass of 56, meaning that each atom of Fe contains 56 Protons and Neutrons in its nucleus. From (3) it should be clear that if we had Avogadro's number (1 Mole) of these Fe atoms, we would have a mass of 56 grams. (This locic requires some reverse reasoning - but if you think about it a little, it makes sense).
2. From the periodic table we can determine that iron oxide, Fe₂O₃, has 160 AMU. This means that 1 Mole of Fe₂O₃ has a mass of 160g

General Rule

Determine how many AMU a substance has. 1 Mole of that substance will have a mass of that AMU in grams.

See also Red Dye Example.

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All proteins are various compositions of twenty specific naturally occurring amino acids.

The twenty naturally occurring amino acids that comprise proteins are (almost) ALL of the L- form. Only ONE of the twenty amino acids is not in the L- form, and that is glycine. The reason for this is that the side chain group is a hydrogen atom.

Aside from the twenty standard amino acids, there are a vast number of "non-standard" amino acids. Two of these can be specified by the genetic code, but are rather rare in proteins.

Amino acids form short polymer chains called peptides or longer chains called either polypeptides or proteins.

Proteins are versatile macromolecules which perform a variety of functions by changing their conformational shape. Life is organised by changes in protein shape.

The main driving force in protein folding occurs as uncharged non-polar groups of particular amino acids join together and avoid water (hydrophobic).

Each protein begins as a polypeptide, translated from a sequence of mRNA as a linear chain of amino acids. However each amino acid in the chain can be thought of having certain 'gross' chemical features. These may be hydrophobic, hydrophilic, or electrically charged, for example. These interact with each other and their surroundings in the cell to produce a well-defined, three dimensional shape. The resulting three-dimensional structure is determined by the sequence of the amino acids.

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The DNA in each of our cell nuclei is 2 meters long. To visualise some of the complexity regarding synthesizing this DNA (making copies), it helps to size the DNA up to scale:

• Pack 2000 kilometers of diameter 2 mm string to fill an ordinary size room (diameter 6 m) in such a way that every single bit of it is available for synthesis (copying).
• This string is synthesized from 100,000 different starting sites, which needs coordination.
• A certain protein is distributed at each of these sites. Before synthesis, excess protein is removed. As the DNA is synthesized, the protein is also gradually removed. This protein is a 'ticket' that you give up as you pass along the string to synthesize, but can't go back over the same bit of DNA until a new ticket (license) is issued.
• There are 6 of these protein which come as a hexameric ring.
• Since this protein is a good antigen and remains within the nucleus even though it travels in and out the DNA, we can use an antibody to look for cells that contain this marker for cancer diagnosis. Cells such as our hair, urine or flem should not contain this protein.

Reworked from a talk by Paul Davis on the Australian Science Show

A simplified view on gene expression, taken from a You tube animation:

• Receptors on the cell's surface trigger signalling mechanisms involving other proteins in the cell's cytoplasm.
• In the cytoplasm, the signalling elements are involved in a cascade of events.
• The final components interact with the DNA in the nucleus at very specific sites to begin the expression of the desired gene.
• To start transcription, several proteins are often required to bind the regulatory elements on the DNA. This step in the process is were DNA is read and a complementary strand of RNA is produced.
• The RNA undergoes many changes, including the systematic removal of RNA sections not needed to code for the desired proteins.
• RNA then takes the information encoded in the DNA out of the nucleus.
• In a process called translation, ribosomes interact with the messenger RNA and transfer RNAs to create the chain of amino acids coded for on the DNA.
• This amino acid chain undergoes changes in configuration including specific folding. Each protein takes on a 3D shape required for a functional end product.
• The new protein then leaves the cell.

Genes are at the mercy of experience - behaviour causes changes in the expression of genes. The means is still Darwinian - culture sets up the selection pressure. Following are some examples given at a talk in Melbourne, Australia 2011:

• when in stress you are more likely to get ill. Nervous system tells endocrine system to release hormones such as cortisol which surpresses the immune system by means of switching off genes (blocking gene expression).
• Cultures that domesticate cattle have a LCT gene (on chromosome 2) which enables them to digest lactose.
• Blue eyes and pale skin occured around the Baltic sea about 6000 years ago when agriculture was starting off. The grain diet is devoid of Vitamin D. Vitamin D needs UV. Since the area was devoid of sunlight, the paler skin and blue eyes enabled more UV absorption.

Matt Ridley, Genes, Technology and the Evolution of Culture

Chromosomes form only when cells are dividing

Mitochondrial DNA

Mitochondrial DNA was discovered in the 1960s by Margit M. K. Nass and Sylvan Nass

Mitochondria are structures that convert food into energy using Adenosine Triphosphate. Since its DNA can be determined from a large number of species, it is used in anthropology and field biology.

The vast majority of the proteins present in the mitochondria (numbering approximately 1500 different types in mammals) are coded for by nuclear DNA, but the genes for some of them, if not most, are thought to have originally been of bacterial origin, having since been transferred to the eukaryotic nucleus during evolution.

The DNA present in these structures are solely inherited from the mother. An egg contains 100,000 to 1,000,000 mtDNA molecules, whereas a sperm contains only 100 to 1000. The mitochondria in mammalian sperm are usually destroyed by the egg cell after fertilization.

Unlike nuclear DNA, which is inherited from both parents and in which genes are rearranged in the process of recombination, there is usually no change in mtDNA from parent to offspring.

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Gas anesthetics work by very weak, purely physical, quantum-mechanical interactions. they don't form chemical or ionic bonds of any kind, they're not polar molecules, they don't bind to receptors and they can be inert. For example, the inert gas xenon is an anesthetic.

Within proteins are specific tiny pockets that are lipid-like and the anesthetic gas molecules get sucked into these little pockets. Once there, the anesthetic molecules don't form chemical bonds like other drugs, they bind only by very weak Van Der Waals London forces. One or two gas molecules per protein do the trick.

Proteins normally dance back and forth between different forms and shapes to perform their functions. And what controls the dancing are quantum-mechanical forces in these pockets. The pockets are like the tiny brain within each protein.

What choreographs them all together is quantum coherence. The 'brain' proteins dance synchronously due to coherence among quantum actions in the pockets throughout wide regions of the brains. So by forming their own quantum interactions in the pockets, anesthetics inhibit normally occurring quantum-mechanical forces necessary for consciousness.

Stewart Hameroff: Could Life And Consciousness Be Related To The Fundamental Quantum Nature Of The Universe?

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A Tubulin is one of several members of a small family of globular proteins. The most common members of the tubulin family are a-tubulin and ß-tubulin, the proteins that make up microtubules.

The tubulin protein turns out to be a dimer consisting of two monomers that are almost identical in structure. Each monomer is formed by a core of two beta sheets surrounded by helices, and each binds to a guanine nucleotide. In addition to a nucleotide binding site, each monomer also has two other binding sites, one for proteins, and one for the anti-cancer drug taxol.

Interest in tubulin structure heated up intensely in recent years when taxol, a natural substance found in the bark of the Pacific yew tree, was shown in clinical tests to be an effective treatment for a number of cancers including ovarian, breast, and lung. Cancer occurs when cell division runs amok.

By binding to tubulin and causing the protein to lose its flexibility, taxol prevents a cell from dividing.

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Microtubules are one of the components of the cytoskeleton, the cell's framework. They have a diameter of 25 nm and length varying from 200 nanometers to 25 micrometers. Microtubules serve as structural components within cells. They are essential for a variety of biological functions including cell movement, cell division (mitosis) and establishment and maintenance of cell form and function.

In neurons, microtubules self-assemble to extend axons and dendrites and form synaptic connections.

Microtubules interact with membrane structures and activities by linking proteins and 'second messenger' chemicals.

Biological cells typically contain approximately 10^7 tubulins. Nanosecond swithcing in microtubule automata predicts roughly 10^16 operations per second, per neuron. As the human brain contains about 10^11 neurons, nonosecond microtubule automata offer about 10^27 brain operations per second.

Unlike chemical synapses which separate neural processes by 3050 nanometers, gap junction separations are 3.5 nanometers, whithin range for quantum tunneling.

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Today it is understood that 99% of all the species that have lived on the earth have since died out.

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp222

... Because the world is constantly in a state of change, nature favours the varied - a community of predominantly white moths is better off if it contains a few dark moths, against a smoggy day - and the geographically dispersed, those who do not keep all their eggs in one basket.

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way pp238

Humans have been around 2 million years. The dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago. The recently discovered multi cell organism Charnia lived about 560 million years ago. Microscopic single cell organisms first appeared about 3.5 billion years ago.

Just before complex life appeared, the world was in the grip of the biggest ice age in known history, called Snowball Earth. In places the ice was more than a kilometer thick. Microscopic bacteria managed to live in this environment. These organisms are referred to as Extremophiles. They can be burried a kilometer down in ice and still survive.

After some million years, Snowball Earth began to warm due to a global surge in volcanic activity. The released gasses created a greenhouse. Cyanobacteria and other oxygen producing microbes began to bloom accross the globe.

This increase in oxygen was the key to the rise of the animal kingdom. It enabled some cells to stick together. Sponges are just collections of simple cells. Sponge cells are bound together by collagen, a glue-like substance. It is the commonest protein in our body and present in animals only. You need oxygen to be able to manufacture collagen.

Looking at the genes, the sponge is clearly an animal. Little pieces of sponge can be squeezed through a filter. After about 3 weeks, the cells will recombine and form a sponge again.

Gradually more complex creatures appeared. Some of the first animals to live on this planet lived on the bottom of the ocean. They were Proto Animals, living on dissolved carbon and other nutrients from the deep ocean. They were simple animals which were built using fractal geometry requiring only 6 or 8 genetic commands. Compare this with the 25 thousand or so commands needed to build a mammal. Fractal animals enabled the early creatures to absorb nutrients over a very large area. However after just a few million years of evolution, they vanished.

The first animals to appear with the same basic body plan as today's animals appeared 550 million years ago. Simple molluscs that were able to move. The modern animal body uses bilateral symmetry. A head at one end and a tail at the other points to the fact that sensory capacity had evolved. Animals started to reproduce sexually, exchanging genes with each other. Sexual reproduction is one of the fundamental steps in evolution.

The uniformity of size of a group of animals is an indication that sexual reproduction has taken place because animals breed around the same time to maximize success. Now over many generations, species were able to adapt to their environment. Mobile animals now needed to consume vast quantities of food and hence developed internal organs to help digestion.

Compiled from D. Attenborough: First Life Documentary

The term Evolution can confuse some people thinking it implies purposeful change, but the better term is Natural Selection.

Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection. But many tend to think that humans are somehow the combination of all of that. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch that sun's demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then do exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoeba.

Sumatian Reece: Dark Materials (speech)

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All life forms are build from 4 types of large molecules:

• Carbohydrates, consisting of sugars
• Lipids and membranes consisting of fats
• Nucleic acids consisting of nucleotides
• Proteins consisting of amino acids

The simplest cell contains 10¹¹ atoms in very complex structures.

Each chromosome contains a long coil of DNA. If all the chromosomes were unwound, the DNA in just one of our cells would stretch 2 m long.

The finest cells in the retina measure about 2 microns accross. Current (2009) household digital cameras have about 7 to 8 microns resolution.

T cells are a progeny from the same stem cells that give rise to all your other blood cell types, so they are distant cousins of red blood cells, of the macrophages which are major infection fighting cells.

But the T cell precursors don't grow up in the same environment as these other cell types, they migrate out of the bone marrow where the other kinds of blood cells are generated to the thymus which is a school for T cells, it's kind of an academy for T cells. The cells that first come into the thymus are not committed to become T cells, and there is a fantastic analogy with a real human education; it's like taking a young student and enrolling them in a religious seminary before they are actually certain whether they have a religious vocation not.

And over the next little while they have to decide whether they really have this vocation, and they are certainly influenced by the environment. Finally they become committed to it, and then they still have to undergo training. So the commitment process is really what we study in my lab. They do this through a very error-prone and random receptor-generating process that has the potential for creating a great deal of trouble for the body unless it is very well filtered.

And so the cells go through an extraordinary selection process, and the thymus is a really relentless purifier of the population, selecting only those cells that have happened to get receptors that are potentially useful and not harmful for the body. And that's a remarkable process. Also it's coupled with making professional subspecialty choices on the parts of these developing T cells. They finally come out from this process maybe after a month, and they then go out into the body and they then begin their function.

Ellen Rothenberg - ABC Science Show, Australia 21 May 2011

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Some 10 to 100 trillion cells make up our body. For every cell in our body, there are 20 bacterial cells. 10 percent of our dry weight are bacteria

Viruses can alter the DNA of its host cells; 5 to 8 percent of the human genome is from ancient retroviruses.

Viruses can change RNA to DNA and transport DNA from one organism to another.

In 2002, Dr Eckard Wimmer and his team first managed to synthesize the Polio virus, which contains 7500 nucleotides. To construct the virus, the researchers say they followed a recipe they downloaded from the internet and used gene sequences from a mail-order supplier.

Having constructed the virus, which appears to be identical to its natural counterpart, the researchers, from the University of New York at Stony Brook, injected it into mice to demonstrate that it was active. See this BBC article

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Avogadro's law: Equal volumes of all gases contain equal numbers of molecules.
E.g when it takes 0.1 gram of Hydrogen to fill a balloon, it would take about 1.6 grams of oxygen to inflate the balloon to an equal size, but both balloons will contain the same amount of molecules.

Isaac Asimov: Atom

See also Red Dye Example

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Next comes the question, precisely how does the order of the A,B,C,D units determine the arrangement of the amino acids in the protein? This is the central unsolved problem in biology today. The first clues, or pieces of information, however, are these: there are in the cell tiny particles called microsomes, and it is now known that that is the place where proteins are made. But the microsomes are not in the nucleus, where the DNA and its instructions are ... the RNA, which is a kind of copy of the DNA ... The RNA, which somehow carries the message as to what kind of protein to make goes over to the microsome, that is known. When it gets there, protein is synthesized at the microsome. That is also known. However, the details of how the amino acids come in and are arranged in accordance with a code that is on the RNA are, as yet, still unknown.

R.Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp57

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Thus most chemical reactions do not occur, because there is what is called an *activation energy* in the way. In order to add an extra atom to our chemical requires that we get it close enough that some rearrangement can occur; then it will stick. But if we can not give it enough energy to get it close enough, it will not go to completion, it will just go partway up the "hill" and back down again. However if we could literally take the molecules in our hands and push and pull the atoms around in such a way as to open a hole to let the new atom in, and then let it snap back, we would have found another way, "around the hill", which would not require extra energy, and the reaction would go easily. Now there actually *are*, in the cells, *very* large molecules, much larger than the ones whose changes we have been describing, which in some complicated way hold the smaller molecules just right, so that the reaction can occur easily. These are very large and complicated things we call *enzymes*...

R.Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp52

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When magnifying a water drop until it is 24 km accross ... we see a kind of teeming, something which no longer has a smooth appearance - it looks something like a crowd at a football game as seen from a very great distance. In order to see what this teeming is about, we will magnify it another 250 times ... the water is now magnified a billion times and we can see the individual molecules.

Adapted from R.Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp4

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Burning
Carbon attracts oxygen much more than oxygen attracts oxygen or carbon attracts carbon. Therefore in this process, the oxygen may arrive with only a little energy, but the oxygen and carbon will snap together with a tremendous vengeance and commotion, and anything near them will pick up the energy. A large amount of motion energy (kinetic energy) is thus generated. This of course is burning.

R.Feynman: Six easy pieces, pp16

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A state of matter of a dilute gas of weakly interacting bosons confined in an external potential. Under such conditions, a large fraction of the bosons collapse into the lowest quantum state of the external potential, and all wave functions overlap each other, at which point quantum effects become apparent on a macroscopic scale.

"Condensates" are extremely low-temperature fluids which contain properties and exhibit behaviors that are currently not completely understood, such as spontaneously flowing out of their containers. The effect is the consequence of quantum mechanics, which states that since continuous spectral regions can typically be neglected, systems can almost always acquire energy only in discrete steps. If a system is at such a low temperature that it is in the lowest energy state, it is no longer possible for it to reduce its energy, not even by friction. Without friction, the fluid will easily overcome gravity because of adhesion between the fluid and the container wall, and it will take up the most favorable position (all around the container).

Bose-Einstein condensation is an exotic quantum phenomenon that was observed in dilute atomic gases for the first time in 1995, and is now the subject of intense theoretical and experimental study.

If the physics of condensed phases (coherent phases) is to prove relevant to consciousness, then there would have to be such mechanism that functions at normal body temperature. And, in fact, there is one. The 'pumped system' first described by professor Herbert Frohlich some 20 years ago, and known to exist in biological tissue, seems to satisfy all the necessary criteria. Frohlich's 'pumped system' is simply a system of vibrating electrically charged molecules (dipoles) into which energy is pumped. The vibrating dipoles (molecules in the cell walls of living tissue) emit electromagnetic vibrations (photons), just like so many miniature radio transmitters, as they jiggle. Frohlich demonstrated that beyond a certain threshold, any additional energy pumped into the system causes the molecules of that kind to vibrate in unison. They do so increasingly until they pull themselves into the most ordered form of condensed phase possible - a 'Bose-Einstein condensate'.

Danah Zohar: The Quantum Self (pp61)

Evidence for coherent states (Bose-Einstein condensates) in biological tissue is now abundant, and the interpretation of its meaning lies at the cutting edge of exciting breakthroughs in our understanding of what distinguishes life form non-life. I think that the same Bose-Einstein condensation amongst neurone constituents is what distinguishes the conscious from the non-conscious. I think it is the physical basis of consciousness.

Danah Zohar: The Quantum Self (pp67)

The Bose-Einstein condensate which gives us the physical basis of consciousness arises from the correlated jiggling of molecules in the neurone cell walls. The exent to which these molecules are correlated, and hence the extent to which the Bose-Einstein condensate is coherent depends upon the amount of energy pumped into the brain's quantum system at any given moment. If there is less energy available to the system, then the unity of consciousness will be less marked; if here is more energy, there will be greater unity. The range of unity possible in both directions is enormous.

Danah Zohar: The Quantum Self (pp98)

The difference between a living system and a non-living system is the radical increase (an order of magnitude 20 times greater) in the occupation number of the electronic levels. That is, in living systems photons are very much more (exponentially more) bunched together, literally squashed into a coherent Bose-Einstein condensate, whereas in the non-living they are less tightly packed. But this difference is one of degree, not of principle.

Fritz Popp

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These are some references to publications. Many other excerpt and ideas are from reputable web articels and radio/tv programs.

• David Bodanis: e = mc2, ISBN: 0-330-39165-8
• Fritjof Capra: The Tao of Physics, ISBN: 0-553-26379-x
• Michael Talbot: The Holographic Universe, ISBN: 0-246-13690-1
• Roger Penrose: The Emperor's new mind, ISBN: 0-19-286198-0
• Timothy Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, ISBN: 0-09-980050-0
• D.Blair, G.McNamara: Ripples on a cosmic sea, ISBN: 1-86448-503-5
• Oliver Sacks: Musicophelia, ISBN: 978-0-330-44436-1
• Isaac Asimov: Atom, ISBN: 0-452-26834-6
• Ervin Laszlo: science and the Akashic field, ISBN: 978-1-59477-181-1
• David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go? ISBN 0-09-974751-0
• Kevin Frank: Stuart Hameroff's theories regarding microtubules as the seat of consciousness. Magazine: Rolf Lines
• Danah Zohar: The Quantum Self. ISBN 0-00-654426-6
• Richard P. Feynman: Six easy pieces

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