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One of the most important The open questions in science are how our consciousness is established. In the 1990s, long before winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his prediction of black holes, physicist Roger Penrose teamed up with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to come up with an ambitious answer.
They claimed that the brain’s neural system forms a complex network and that the consciousness it produces should obey the rules of quantum mechanics – the theory that determines how tiny particles like electrons move. This, they argue, could explain the mysterious complexity of human consciousness.
Penrose and Hameroff were met with disbelief. The laws of quantum mechanics generally only apply at very low temperatures. Quantum computers, for example, currently operate at around -272 ° C. At higher temperatures, classical mechanics take over.
Since our bodies operate at room temperature, you would expect them to be governed by the classical laws of physics. For this reason, the theory of quantum consciousness has been categorically rejected by many scientists – although others are staunch supporters.
Instead of entering this debate, I decided to join with Chinese colleagues, led by Professor Xian-Min Jin of Shanghai Jiaotong University, to test some of the principles behind quantum theory. of consciousness.
In our new article, we investigated how quantum particles could move around in a complex structure like the brain, but in a laboratory environment. If our results can one day be compared to the activity measured in the brain, we could take another step towards validating or rejecting the controversial theory of Penrose and Hameroff.
Brains and Fractals
Our brains are made up of cells called neurons, and their combined activity is believed to generate consciousness. Each neuron contains microtubules which carry substances to different parts of the cell. The Penrose-Hameroff theory of quantum consciousness argues that microtubules are structured according to a fractal pattern that would allow quantum processes to occur.
Fractals are structures that are neither two-dimensional nor three-dimensional, but rather are a fractional value in between. In mathematics, fractals emerge as beautiful patterns that repeat themselves over and over again, generating what is seemingly impossible: a structure that has a finite area, but an infinite perimeter.
It may seem impossible to visualize, but fractals occur frequently in nature. If you look closely at cauliflower florets or fern branches, you will see that they are both made of the same basic shape that is repeated over and over again, but on smaller and smaller scales. This is a key characteristic of fractals.
The same thing happens if you look inside your own body: the structure of your lungs, for example, is fractal, as are the blood vessels in your circulatory system. Fractals are also featured in the enchanting repetitive artwork of MC Escher and Jackson Pollock, and they have been used for decades in technology, such as antenna design.
These are all examples of classical fractals – fractals that follow the laws of classical physics rather than quantum physics.
It’s easy to see why fractals have been used to explain the complexity of human consciousness. Because they are infinitely complex, allowing complexity to emerge from simple repeating patterns, they could be the structures that support the mysterious depths of our minds.
But if so, it could only happen at the quantum level, with tiny particles moving in fractal patterns through neurons in the brain. This is why the proposition of Penrose and Hameroff is called the theory of “quantum consciousness”.
Quantum consciousness
We are not yet able to measure the behavior of quantum fractals in the brain, if they exist. But advanced technology means we can now measure quantum fractals in the lab. In recent research involving a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), my colleagues from Utrecht and I carefully arranged the electrons in a fractal pattern, creating a quantum fractal.
When we next measured the wave function of the electrons, which describes their quantum state, we found that they too lived in the fractal dimension dictated by the physical model we had created. In this case, the pattern we used at the quantum scale was the Sierpiński triangle, which is a shape that falls somewhere between one dimension and two dimensions.
It was an exciting discovery, but STM techniques cannot probe how quantum particles move – which would tell us more about how quantum processes might occur in the brain. So, in our latest research, my colleagues from Shanghai Jiaotong University and I went even further. Using cutting-edge photonic experiments, we were able to reveal the quantum motion that takes place in fractals in unprecedented detail.
We achieved this by injecting photons (particles of light) into a carefully designed artificial chip in a tiny Sierpiński triangle. We injected photons at the tip of the triangle and observed their propagation throughout its fractal structure in a process called quantum transport. We then repeated this experiment on two different fractal structures, both shaped like squares rather than triangles. And in each of these structures, we have carried out hundreds of experiments.
Our observations from these experiments reveal that quantum fractals actually behave differently from classical fractals. More precisely, we have found that the propagation of light through a fractal is governed by different laws in the quantum case compared to the classical case.
This new knowledge of quantum fractals could provide the basis for scientists to experimentally test the theory of quantum consciousness. If quantum measurements are ever taken in the human brain, they could be compared to our results to definitely decide whether consciousness is a classical or a quantum phenomenon.
Our work could also have profound implications in all scientific fields. By studying quantum transport in our artificially designed fractal structures, we may have taken the first small steps towards unifying physics, mathematics and biology, which could significantly enrich our understanding of the world around us as well. than the world that exists in our heads.
This article was originally published on The conversation by Cristiane de Morais Smith To Utrecht University. Read it original article here.
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