Honeybees are found to interact with quantum fields | Hacker News Reader

Honeybees are found to interact with quantum fields

science.box.sk

62 pointsprakash34 comments

Horrible headline.

The part of the article that talks about quantum mumbo-jumbo is prefaced with this:

"At this point Shipman departs from safely grounded scholarship and enters instead the airy realm of speculation."

It also says,

"But she tends not to have much professional company when she reveals what she thinks is responsible for the bees' response."

I'd be happy to put money down that this turns out to be bunk. Not that I know anything more than the person making these claims, but purely informed by history. Many, many scientists (including most famously Roger Penrose) have claimed that quantum phenomena exist in the biological world. None of these claims have been proven.

No kidding. The first part, and even the alpha sounds cool, but the quantum part is bunk. She seems to have skipped chemistry: what physical mechanism can a bee use to detect these fields? After all they are made of proteins. What chemical mechanism would do it?

Plus saying "detect quantum fields" is meaningless anyway.

There is no such thing, it's a mathematical abstract, it's not an actual thing. There are many kinds of fields, saying quantum field gives some information about the type (for example that it's discontinuous), but it's not a specific field.

Actually, there are some interpretations of quantum mechanics under which the wavefunction is an "actual thing", for example De Broglie's pilot-wave theory and Bohm's developments of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohm_interpretation

The other way to think about it is we all interact with quantum fields all the time. A photon is a quantum field. Interacting with electric, magnetic, or an other force is interacting with a quantum field. Nothing new there. [/Disclaimer: I read the comments above and declined to read the article. ]

Exactly. The idea that bees could somehow be experiencing a six-dimensional manifold doesn't seem crazy to me.

Bee's have a ~million neurons and they have a simple language etc. Now you might assume they think like we do and then say "there brains are to tiny to do that" and then go off on a tangent. However, building a neural net with 50k neurons would let them do complex calculations without understanding them. They don't need to "think", flap wing, flap wing, flap wing, flap wing to fly just have a few cells which pulse every few fractions of a second and it works.

So, the calculation of a six fold manifold might be going on in their tiny brains but it's not thought just raw math. Evolving systems don't need to produce maintainable code they just need to work. The idea that our brains can get our eyes to work and walking works etc but bee's can't do calculations is silly. They don't need to understand what's going on just simulate something that works.

True. I would like to add that an eye can detect a single photon, but there's really no way to use that meaningfully to make use of quantum mechanics at a bee-level.

Speculation, yes, but it's still science. She has a theory, and hopefully she'll come up with a way to test it. This is how progress happens.

I modded the story up not because of the content releated to the headline, but because it appears the bee dances are 2D projections of the flag manifolds she studies. She may be wrong about the mechanism she proposed for why this happens, but when you find things that fit together so neatly in the natural world, that's a clear sign: this warrants investigation.

Its only a hypothesis until she can find a way to test it. She discovered a similar mathematical principle that encompasses the envelope of recorded bee dances. That is not necessarily the only mathematical principle which can contain the same envelope. She then starts thinking about quantum states of quarks and such but doesn't have a valid way to test this yet. Its similar to ideas some people have that the brain utilizes quantum effects. No one has been able to experimentally prove or disprove this idea yet, therefore its still a hypothesis.

If she, as a mathematician, had at least an encompassing mathematical model that could theorize how a bee's brain could interact on a neuronal level with quarks, then we could venture into calling it a theory. She doesn't have that though, so its still only a hypothesis.

Yes, you are correct. But I think my point still stands.

Indeed. Perhaps I can explain a little more what she discovered, and why this connection to QFT is almost surely nonsense.

The flag manifold in question comes from matrix groups; basically, consider some subset of 3x3 matrices which satisfy a certain property. I.e., certain types of transformations of a 3d space. While the space of 3x3 matrices has 3x3=9 dimensions, subsets can have fewer dimensions (in this case, 6).

The two-dimensional projections she discovered are functions of the 6 dimensional matrices.

So here is the occams razor explanation for what is happening. Inside the bee's head is an ODE (ordinary differential equation) solver, basically an analog computer. Just think of the ODE solver as a complicated timer, but with output depending on both time and some hidden variable. These are common objects in biology, and don't require many neurons.

The output of the ODE solver is wired to some neurons which reduce 6 variables to 2, according to the formula she discovered.

This is a fantastic discovery, a triumph of applied math. But the connection to QFT is almost surely coincidence: QFT uses symmetries of matrix groups over 3 dimensions, and the bee (which lives in 3 dimensions) also does.

This phenomenon is called universality. Certain objects repeat across diverse areas simply because it is the only logical way (or the most common logical way) that things could happen.

All at once you brought together Occam's Razor, Universality, differential equations, manifolds, and quantum field theory into a comment I actually understand. You should teach.

He invoked Occam's Razor. But most of the other stuff he only mentioned.

It's a nice comment. But: He invoked Occam's Razor. Most of the other stuff he only mentioned.

wow, great explanation. thanks.

Do you happen to know any other examples of such things from biology, particularly in a shockingly small number of neurons?

Great explanation, btw.

Well, neural integrators are known, I know the ocular system has some. A quick google search finds this:

http://hebb.mit.edu/courses/9.29/2003/athena/bearlee/Neural_...

An integrator basically solves the ODE y'(t)=f(t); the firing rate is proportional to y(t). So if you wire up integrators appropriately, you could solve most ODE's (obviously, there are scaling issues, noise, etc). In principle, one could reproduce the bee's behavior by appropriately connecting six of these.

But I admit, this example is one of the more fantastic examples I've seen. It's a simple algebraic manifold (1) and obtained purely from observation of behavior rather than lab work.

(1) In biology, you usually get shapes which are big ugly messes, imagine the surface of a child's playdough sculpture. Instead, she found something pretty like kepler's conic sections (to borrow the analogy from the article). That's uncommon in biology.

Very interesting, thanks!

This critique raises some interesting points: http://www.ortholog.com/archive/in_response/bees_arent_quant...

"""... Just because it takes a lot of maths doesn't mean it isn't easy to do. Mathematics is a (formal language for the) description of events, not the other way round. Take integration for example, the mathematical operation of finding the integral e.g. finding the area under a curve specified by a quadratic equation. There are humans with 1.75kg of brain tissue that can't do that, so it must be hard, right? However, it takes just a handful of electronic components to devise a circuit that outputs the integral. Can we really say for certain that there isn't a simple enough circuit you can build out of bee neurones to compute the angles encoded in the waggle dance? Of course not. It was recently shown by Elbing and coworkers that we can build some electronic components from single molecules. It isn't intrinsically hard; it's just hard to write down.

A bee doesn't need "equipment sensitive to the quantum-mechanical world"; it just needs visual acuity and some simple circuitry. Well, two circuits. First, an encoder that takes inputs from its primitive memory, recently stimulated by the food discovery and the excited journey home noting sun/horizon landmarks, and outputs the dance. And secondly, a decoder to recognise the dance before its cute little compound eyes and compute the relevant angles for navigation. It sounds complicated but it isn't. Consider this: how complex are the mathematical operations required for a human to catch a thrown ball? Pretty complex and likely to take up a lot of paper--but, crucially, they don't take up a lot of brain circuitry if such things can, after Elbing (or more properly, billions of years before Elbing), be built of a handful of molecules. Just because a rational, sentient, conscious process struggles to achieve a thing doesn't make it a hard thing to do. Doing is easier than computing, for most values of "do" and "compute"."""

Interesting article, but the headline is a bit misleading:

"At this point Shipman departs from safely grounded scholarship and enters instead the airy realm of speculation. The flag manifold, she notes, in addition to providing mathematicians with pure joy, also happens to be useful to physicists in solving some of the mathematical problems that arise in dealing with quarks, tiny particles that are the building blocks of protons and neutrons. And she does not believe the manifold's presence both in the mathematics of quarks and in the dance of honeybees is a coincidence. Rather she suspects that the bees are somehow sensitive to what's going on in the quantum world of quarks, that quantum mechanics is as important to their perception of the world as sight, sound, and smell."

Sigh. What the article claims is that the structure of bee dances are like the structure of the maths used in quantum physics. So what? bee brains could have neural nets that produce similar output as the quantum physics models.

Correlation is not causation - that's an elementary mistake.

And I'm still not sure what a "quantum field" is. The probability of an electron being present? We all interact with those when we press up against you know, matter.

bee brains could have neural nets that produce similar output as the quantum physics models

I think that's the point of the article. Bee brains couldn't with only a few million neurons. That's not to say she is right.

Why ever not with "only" a few million neurons? Have you proved, mathematically, that there is a lower limit?

How many neurons does it take to crunch a few patterns? I'd think that a couple thousand ought to do it.

Awful headline, and article could benefit from an editor and some pictures of the dances/projections described.

But, the similarity between bee dances and smaller-dimension projections of 6-dimensional shapes is very interesting... it bees have evolved an efficient storage/communication format for their path data.

And yet, what are the 6 dimensions? 3 for coordinates in space; 1 for time, then... ? Magnetic field strength? Environmental scent gradients?

Oh, I know! Just like ants leave chemical trails, bees would like to do the same. But in the air, chemicals would blow away.... in our universe. So they use their wings as tiny oscillation overthrusters and leave a stigmergic trail in the 8th dimension. Someone tell Dr. Banzai, and watch out for lectroids.

Given what's already known of the bee dance I suspect it's all about radial vectors:

Angle of the sun to the hive

Angle of the hive to the food

Distance to the food

Angle of horizon to food (height)

Angle of up (gravity)

Angle of magnetic north

What's funny about this headline is that almost everything interacts with quantum fields. Indeed, that's what matter is. If you look at in the right way, a honeybee is what you get when you apply just the right sequence of field creation operators to the vacuum.

Golden ratio, quantum mechanics... Those bees are quite sophisticated.

BTW: *.box.sk == old school

Tell me you remember the timeless astalavista.box.sk ...

Thanks! Very interesting discussion, just let me add two little pieces of information that might be useful to the people who would like to inquire further:

One of the first if not the first to propose quantum mechanical processes related to consciousness was Evan Harris Walker his book "The physics of consciousness" (Basic Books, 2000) which makes a very interesting reading.

The latest on this, as far as I know, can be found in the book "Quantum Aspects of Life" (Word Scientific, 2008)

Happy New Year!

box.sk found to interact with nut jobs

Emperor's New Mind, anyone?

they must do something to that site. way too painful to read.

Read Richard Dawkins.

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