Tony's Home 240 Thoughts
| Gravity | Vacuum | BEC | Sonoluminescence | Water Structure |
| Atomic Clusters - EVOs | Cells and Chips | Qi Field | DNA and Genetic Code |
| Quantum Computing and Superluminal Information | Communication |
Jacques Benveniste, Jacques Benveniste, Yolene Thomas, and others claim to have established experimentally a Memory of Water. Brian Josephson, in a letter to the New Scientist, says: "... advocates of homeopathic remedies attribute their effects not to molecules present in the water, but to modifications of the water's structure. Simple-minded analysis may suggest that water, being a fluid, cannot have a structure of the kind that such a picture would demand. But cases such as that of liquid crystals, which while flowing like an ordinary fluid can maintain an ordered structure over macroscopic distances, show the limitations of such ways of thinking. There have not, to the best of my knowledge, been any refutations of homeopathy that remain valid after this particular point is taken into account. ...".
According to a 15 March 2001 article by Lionel Milgrom in the Guardian: "... A consortium of four independent research laboratories in France, Italy, Belgium, and Holland, led by Professor M Roberfroid at Belgium's Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, used a refinement of Benveniste's original experiment that examined another aspect of basophil activation. The team knew that activation of basophil degranulation by aIgE leads to powerful mediators being released, including large amounts of histamine, which sets up a negative feedback cycle that curbs its own release. So the experiment the pan-European team planned involved comparing inhibition of basophil aIgE-induced degranulation with "ghost" dilutions of histamine against control solutions of pure water. In order to make sure no bias was introduced into the experiment by the scientists from the four laboratories involved, they were all "blinded" to the contents of their test solutions. In other words, they did not know whether the solutions they were adding to the basophil-aIgE reaction contained ghost amounts of histamine or just pure water. But that's not all. The ghost histamine solutions and the controls were prepared in three different laboratories that had nothing further to do with the trial. The whole experiment was coordinated by an independent researcher who coded all the solutions and collated the data, but was not involved in any of the testing or analysis of the data from the experiment. Not much room, therefore, for fraud or wishful thinking. So the results when they came were a complete surprise. Three of the four labs involved in the trial reported a statistically significant inhibition of the basophil degranulation reaction by the ghost histamine solutions compared with the controls. The fourth lab gave a result that was almost significant, so the total result over all four labs was positive for the ghost histamine solutions. Still, ... Professor Madeleine Ennis of Queen's University Belfast ... was not satisfied. "In this particular trial, we stained the basophils with a dye and then hand-counted those left coloured after the histamine- inhibition reaction. You could argue that human error might enter at this stage." So she used a previously developed counting protocol that could be entirely automated. This involved tagging activated basophils with a monoclonal antibody that could be observed via fluorescence and measured by machine. The result, shortly to be published in Inflammation Research, was the same: histamine solutions, both at pharmacological concentrations and diluted out of existence, lead to statistically significant inhibition of basophile activation by aIgE, confirming previous work in this area. "Despite my reservations against the science of homoeopathy," says Ennis, "the results compel me to suspend my disbelief and to start searching for a rational explanation for our findings." She is at pains to point out that the pan-European team have not reproduced Benveniste's findings nor attempted to do so. ...".
According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "... The water molecule is not linear but bent in a special way. As a result, part of the molecule is negatively charged and part positively charged. It is thus a highly polar molecule. Hydrogen atoms in water molecules are attracted to regions of high electron density and can form weak linkages, called hydrogen bonds, with those regions. This means that the hydrogen atoms in one water molecule are attracted to the non-bonding electron pairs of the oxygen atom on an adjacent water molecule. As a result, water molecules associate strongly. In an ice crystal,
the association is a highly ordered but loose structure. When the ice melts, this orderly arrangement breaks down partially and the molecules pack more closely together. This makes the liquid denser than the solid, which is why ice forms on top of liquid water. The associative force, however, is still strong enough to prevent water molecules from separating completely even at room temperature. This continued association in the liquid state accounts for the high boiling point of water. The structure of liquid water is believed to consist of aggregates of water molecules that form and re-form continually. This short-range order, as it is called, accounts for other unusual properties of water, such as its high viscosity and surface tension. The polarity of the water molecule plays a major part in the formation of aqueous solutions...."
According to Keith Johnson, in physics/9807058, clusters of water molecules exist optimally in certain Magic Numbers and in configurations such as Buckyball pentagonal dodecahedral structures with a closed, ideally icosahedral symmetry formed by 20 hydrogen-bonded water molecules, with their oxygen atoms at the vertices of 12 concatenated pentagons and with 10 free exterior hydrogen atoms. Coupling of these delocalized oxygen orbitals with the low-frequency cluster vibronic modes via the dynamical Jahn-Teller effect may make water buckyballs catalytic electron reservoirs and oxygenates in fuel combustion and active agents in biological systems. The broad electronic and unique low-frequency vibronic spectra of water buckyballs may explain certain diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs) and far-infrared, ultraviolet and x-ray cosmic background radiation.
When metals such as Palladium, that can absorb large volumes of Hydrogen, are placed in water, phenomena related to Cold Fusion can occur. Interesting phenomena, perhaps related to FAR FIELD Transverse Virtual Gravitons, may also occur when atoms, or Clusters of Atoms, of metals such as Palladium are in aqueous solution.
According to a Clackamas Community College web page:
"...[For]... the self-ionization of pure water ... The concentrations of both H3O+ and OH- are 1.0 x 10-7 M. ... If the concentration of H3O+ goes up by a factor of 10, to become 1.0 x 10-6 M, then the concentration of the OH- goes down by a factor of 10 become 1.0 x 10-8 M. ...".
According to an NYU web page on the work of Mark Tuckerman:
"... In liquid water, H2O molecules form a complex network in which they are connected by hydrogen bonds, a hydrogen atom between two oxygen atoms in a roughly linear arrangement. Each water molecule is surrounded on average by four other water molecules. Adding or removing a proton (H+) in liquid water creates a defect in the water network that is transported by making and breaking of bonds within the system. H3O+, or hydronum ions, the fundamental component in acids, are formed when protons are added and latch on to water molecules. Hydronium ions are surrounded, on average, by three water molecules. Suppose water molecule A (see diagram panel a below)is connected to H3O+ by a hydrogen bond and water molecule B is connected to A by a hydrogen bond. Proton conduction in acids occurs when the hydrogen bond between A and B breaks leaving A surrounded by only two other water molecules and the H3O+ (panel b).This is followed by a transfer of the proton from H3O+ to water molecule A (panel c). The whole process takes only one millionth of one millionth of a second.
Where H3O+ corresponds to an excess proton, hydroxide, or OH- ions, the fundamental component in basic solutions, were long thought to constitute "proton holes" and, therefore, to have chemical properties analogous to those of hydronium. In particular it was thought that proton conduction in basic solutions could be viewed as a kind of chemical "mirror image'' of its acidic counterpart. The team's study demonstrated that, in fact, no such simple chemical analogy exists between H3O+ and OH-. For example, the team showed that OH- is surrounded, on average, by 4-5 water molecules, quite unlike the hydronium case. Moreover, proton conduction in bases requires more complicated rearrangements of water molecules than in acids (see diagram panels b and c below).
Finally, the process is strongly influenced by a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling, a phenomenon that can occur at the microscopic level, which allows particles to traverse spatial regions they normally should not, provided they do it quickly enough. The team carried out the study by solving the fundamental equations that govern how the system develops in time on a supercomputer. ... These findings are reported in a letter to Nature entitled "The Nature and Transport Mechanism of Hydrated Hydroxide Ions in Aqueous Solution." ...".
D. L. Marrin notes that the tetrahedral Hydrogen bonds of water ( in which half of the tetrahedral bonds from Oxygen to Oxygen are covalent and half Hydrogen, unlike the purely covalent Carbon-Carbon tetrahedral bonds of Diamond ) "... are not 'fixed' in time and space. ..." and that even in frozen water Ice the Hydrogen bonds "... are able to re-shuffle at the rate of about a trillion times per second. The manner in which this re-shuffling occurs is described by a probability function and may be represented by a random binary network, similar to that of a computer. From the perspective of cybernetics, the Hydrogen bond network in water may be considered a self-organizing system that behaves chaotically. ... water molecules that are in contact with other surfaces (e.g. air) or with solutes (e.g. salts, organic molecules) arrange themselves into a variety of geometries that impart changes to the network. In this manner, water is capable of discerning 'self'' from 'non-self' and interacting with its environment. Recent findings suggest that the breaking and forming of Hydrogen bonds between macromolecules and surrounding water molecules substantially influences the 3-D structure of proteins and nucleic acids. ...".
According to Physics News Preview
and Physics News Update (Number 410) of the AIP, Isaacs, Shukla, Platzman, Hamann, Barbiellini, and Tulk, in the 18 January 1999 issue of Physical Review Letters, "... [study] the properties of many Compton-scattered photons ... to measure ... [the] ... ground-state electronic wavefunction [of ice] ... The ground-state wavefunction in ice indicates that there is a quantum-mechanical overlap of the electrons on neighboring H2O molecules, i.e., that the hydrogen bond is partly covalent. ... the weak hydrogen bonds between H2O molecules in ice get part of their identity from stronger covalent bonds within the H2O molecule. ... The two relatively strong electronic bonds that make up the H2O molecule itself are represented in the figure by the darker yellow clouds ... While the intermolecular bonds, or hydrogen bonds, are primarily electrostatic in nature, in which the molecules are attracted by means of separated electric charges, [they] found that the bond is in part quantum mechanical, or covalent in nature, in which electrons are spread out and shared between atoms. The quantum-mechanical or wavelike aspect of this bond is depicted by the lighter yellow clouds. ... Figure courtesy of Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies ... Delocalization plays an important role in determining the behavior of superconductors and other electrically conducting materials at sufficiently low temperatures. ... ".
According to AIP Physics News Update Number 648 #1, 1 August 2003, by Schewe, Riordon, and Stein: "... A water molecule's chemical formula is really not H2O, at least from the perspective of neutrons and electrons interacting with the molecule for only attoseconds (less than 10^(-15) seconds). According to new and recent experiments, neutrons and electrons colliding with water for just attoseconds will see a ratio of hydrogen to oxygen of roughly 1.5 to 1, so a more accurate formula for water under these circumstances would be H1.5O. ... The story begins in 1995. At the ISIS neutron spallation facility in the UK, a German-British collaboration collided epithermal neutrons (those with energies of up to a few hundred electron volts) with a target that included water molecules ... Detecting the number and energy loss of the scattered neutrons in the resulting attosecond-scale collisions, the researchers noticed that neutrons were scattering from 25% fewer protons than expected. Apparently, the protons in hydrogen were sometimes "invisible" to the neutron probes. ... theoretical considerations suggest the presence of short-lived (sub-femtosecond) entanglement, in which protons in adjacent hydrogen atoms (and possibly the surrounding electrons) are all interlinked in such a way as to change the nature of the scattering results. Realizing that water itself has anomalous properties, the researchers repeated the neutron experiments in other more typical molecules, for instance in benzene (conventionally noted as C6H6). In that case, they found that the neutrons saw a ratio of hydrogen to carbon of 4.5 to 6! Meanwhile, this effect was also confirmed in various hydrogen-containing metals, in a collaboration with Uppsala University in Sweden. Now, the researchers (with new colleagues in Australia) have decided to use an independent experimental method to verify this effect. In experiments at Australian National University in Canberra, the researchers used electron probes instead of neutrons, as the two particles interact with protons via fundamentally different forces (strong and electromagnetic interactions). Scattering electrons from a solid polymer called formvar (with basic building block C8H14O2), they observed the exact same shortfall in scattered electrons from hydrogen nuclei, comparable to the shortfall of scattered neutrons in accompanying neutron experiments on the same polymer. This supports the earlier results on water and other systems. ...".
According to a 7 November 2001 article by Andy Coghlan in The New Scientist: "... Conventional wisdom says that the dissolved molecules simply spread further and further apart as a solution is diluted. But two chemists have found that some do the opposite: they clump together, first as clusters of molecules, then as bigger aggregates of those clusters. ... German chemist Kurt Geckeler and his colleague Shashadhar Samal stumbled on the effect while investigating fullerenes at their lab in the Kwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea. ... "When he diluted the solution, the size of the fullerene particles increased," says Geckeler. ... To make the otherwise insoluble buckyball dissolve in water, the chemists had mixed it with a circular sugar-like molecule called a cyclodextrin. When they did the same experiments with just cyclodextrin molecules, they found they behaved the same way. So did the organic molecule sodium guanosine monophosphate, DNA and plain old sodium chloride. Dilution typically made the molecules cluster into aggregates five to 10 times as big as those in the original solutions. The growth was not linear, and it depended on the concentration of the original. ... "... The more dilute it starts, the larger the aggregates," says Geckeler. ... it only worked in polar solvents like water, in which one end of the molecule has a pronounced positive charge while the other end is negative. ... Diluting a remedy may increase the size of the particles to the point when they become biologically active. ... Benveniste ... does not think the new findings explain his results because the solutions were not dilute enough. ...".
Sea-Water is even more complex than pure H2O.
Clusters of atoms, perhaps interacting through FAR FIELD Transverse Virtual Gravitons, exhibit interesting phenomena, examples of which include:
The aqueous solution phenomenon of Cold Fusion.
Extraordinary Quantum Properties of Massive Gold Clusters: According to an April 17, 1997, announcement by Dr. Robert L.Whetten, Professor of Physics and Chemistry at Georgia Tech, a new series of highly stable and massive gold-cluster molecules that possess a set of extraordinary quantum properties. ... Each molecule in the new series has a compact, crystalline gold core. This pure metallic core, just one-to-two billionths of a meter (1-2 nanometers) across, is encapsulated within a shell of tightly packed hydrocarbon chains linked to the core via sulfur atoms. The principal members of the series have core-masses of about 14,000; 22,000 and 28,000 protons, corresponding to about 75, 110 and 145 gold atoms, respectively, and are thus in the same mass range as larger protein molecules. ... The precise structures of the cores are ... unknown. ... The conduction electrons of the clusters are quantized both in their number -- charge quantization -- and in the states they can occupy -- energy quantization. ... In crystals larger than a few nanometers, these effects can only be observed and used at very low temperatures, such as that of liquid helium, near absolute zero. ... The new gold cluster materials are the first to exhibit the charge-quantization effect in a macroscopically obtained material, for which every cluster behaves identically. The Micron-Scale of the massive gold-cluster molecules suggests involvement of the Electron Micron-Scale GravitoEM Induction Region, while it is possible that the compact gold core structure could involve the Quark Nanometer-Scale GravitoEM Induction Region.
The high energy yield of explosions of clusters of Xenon atoms when hit by ultrashort (150 fsec), high-intensity (2 x 10^16 W/cm^2) laser pulses. It is not yet understood why clusters explode so much more violently than molecules (producing 1 MeV ions as opposed to 100 eV ions), according to scientists at Imperial College (London) as reported in Physics News Update Number 311 (Story #1), March 13, 1997 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein, who say "The researchers look on their explosions as a novel and modest way of achieving high-temperature plasmas in a gas of clusters. They point to the possibility of tabletop fusion experiments.", citing T. Ditmire et al., Nature, 6 March 1997. The 1 MeV energy level suggests involvement of the SU(3) Color Force as opposed to U(1) Electromagnetism, and therefore involvement of the Quark Nanometer-Scale GravitoEM Induction Region.
Cellular Phenomena:
In water containing biomolecules, quantum phenomena cause filaments to grow into microtubules. Microtubules in living cells, including brain cells, may interact via Electron Micron-Scale GravitoEM Induction Region phenomena, thus producing Consciousness.
Jack Sarfatti says "... It is interesting that the Wheeler GravitoEM Induction Region formula for an electron gives large curvature fluctuation ... out to a micron. Is there some kind of electron-neutrino-quantum gravity resonance here on the mesoscopic scale of a micron? ...".
Further, OSCILLATIONS between mu-neutrinos (Compton radius of about a micron) and e-neutrinos (Compton radius as big as our universe ) might form some sort of link between cell-level individual consciousness and universe-level collective consciousness.
B. J. Baars proposes criteria for locating conscious and unconscious activities in the living brain. The criteria are applied to speech and visual brain scans, and single-cell recording methods. Baars suggests that we may be within reach of a genuine psychoscope that actually sees the images of a person's thoughts.
Consciousness may be based on the principles of Quantum Computers, which may be more effective if they are based on optical computation using photons and/or carbon structures like diamond or buckystructures and/or DNA molecules, rather than present-day conventional solid-state silicon structures and electrons.
Diamonds can be produced by Supernovae, by geological processes on Earth, and by synthesis. According to a 21 August 1999 article in the London Telegraph by Charles Laurence in Gainesville, Florida:
"... Prof Reza Abbaschian ... reveals a selection of perfectly-faceted diamonds in astonishing colours. He said: "Actually, they are better than natural diamonds because we have learned to control the process. We can improve on nature because we can choose the quality, and the colour - and even the shape. These are rough, uncut, and - look! - they look finished." He pats a huge, round, drum-like mould humming just behind him. It is only two and a half feet across and four feet tall, but it is made of solid steel and weighs two and a half tons. Deep in its core, in a little space not much bigger than a thimble, a diamond is growing. Abbaschian, an Iranian by birth, said: "What I am interested in is the making of new materials. These diamonds will be for jewels, but I am looking for the material of the 21st century, the material that will replace the silicon chip." Diamonds, he explains, are a pure carbon crystal and he is simply making them from another form of pure carbon which, as every school-age scientist knows, is graphite. All it takes is a secret catalyst, a carbon "seed", a temperature of 1,700°C, and a pressure of 55,000 atmospheres. Those conditions are a little like the molten centre of the Earth where God or nature invented the diamond long, long ago. ... Abbaschian makes his in five days. ... The Soviets ... had been trying to make diamonds for years. ... Vasili Kachalau, a sad-faced Russian technician not yet quite able to believe his luck in arriving in Florida with his machines, explains that they just wanted to make "windows" for the guidance systems of nuclear rockets, and for ultraviolet and radiation detection instruments capable of watching Chernobyl meltdowns. ... Gen Carter Clarke ... formed a company called Gemesis, went into partnership with the university, and raised the money to buy the old Soviet machines and ship them home. ... there will be jewellery. It will be novel - coloured diamonds are so rare and so popular that a New York jeweller recently offered a half-carat blue for $250,000 (£156,250) - ... Clarke said: "... The average diamond ring costs about $2,000 [£1,250], for about a quarter carat. Ours will be a carat or more and cost somewhere between that $2,000 and, say, double that. ..." ....".
In quant-ph/0104028, Nonclassical radiation nanocrystals, Beveratos, Brouri, Gacoin, Poizat, and Grangier say:
"... The quantum properties of the uorescence light emitted by diamond nanocrystals containing a single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) colored center is investigated. We have observed photon antibunching with very low background light. This system is therefore a very good candidate for the production of single photon on demand. In addition, we have measured larger NV center lifetime in nanocrystals than in the bulk, in good agreement with a simple quantum electrodynamical model. ... Manipulation of nanocrystals is a lot more exible than bulk crystals. Straightforward improvement of the light collection efficiency should be possible by letting the nanocrystal sit on a metallic mirror, or inserting it in a microcavity ... These results show that diamond nanocrystals o er all the required properties for the realization of efficient single photon sources for quantum information systems. ...".
Since photons are U(1) abelian gauge bosons, they do not interact with each other at tree-level. To get interactions for use in computations, you have to use higher-order interactions, which are suppressed by the electromagnetic fine structure constant, or indirect non-linear interactions intermediated by material such as optically non-trivial crystals or fibres.
The Qi Field can be used for healing.
J.Acosta-Urquidi, of the Department of Radiology of the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle, found that some Qi healers, when they were sending Qi energy, had EEGs with above normal baseline values of coherence phase and asymmetry which revealed complex patterns and increased lateralization (although increases in overall average alpha (8-12 Hz) , theta (4-8 Hz) , and delta (0.1-4 Hz) power were small). When sending Qi, the Qi healers had new and robust Bioelectric Frequency Analyser signals from the head, chest and 1-3 ft. distance (BFA frequency resonances, range 3.8-22.8 Hz, mean 14.8+- 7, N = 14).
The Qi Field is called a biofield by A. Detela in his work that describes it as a three-dimensional web woven of vibrating electric and magnetic fields. Lines of these fields are like tiny threads in a three-dimensional textile. These electromagnetic fields display very complex internal organisation. We find a peculiar kind of chiral solutions to Maxwell equations, which do not dissipate energy and lead to stable field structures. This is the so-called informational basis of the biofield. The simplest structures of these kind are toroidal knots. When electric charge with very light mass enters the informational biofield, non-linear phenomena take place. These non-linear phenomena are based upon bifurcations in internal electric currents and upon resonance effects between currents and fields. We find an evolution of the field structure. This evolution is a syntropic process, oriented in time. There are several obvious conditions for syntropic behavior and one of them is quantum coherence in the states of electric charge. Biofield always comprises both : the informational basis and the evolutionary component. Both are necessary. The first obeys the linear Maxwell equations and preserves the structural form of the biofield. Linearity leads to superposition of many different non-local states, therefore to a great capacity of information storage. The second is responsible for evolution of the biofield from primitive toroidal knots to very complex forms (with many knots) which show all the features of life. The structure of biofield is in close correspondence with the molecular structure of living organisms. The discrete knots in the biofield web are in interaction with discrete atoms and molecules in living cells, therefore biofield can regulate many processes in living cells. The most probable candidates for this interaction are chiral molecular structures of proteins and nucleotides, for example microtubules and DNA helices.
G. Rein proposes that DNA functions as antennae for quantum fields of consciousness. In the case of DNA, quantum coherence has been measured experimentally by virtue of the time decay of the photons it emits (Popp FA, Ruth B et al. Emission of visible and ultraviolet radiation by active biological systems Collective Phenomon 3: 187-214, 1981) . Furthermore, electron propagation down its center axis has been measured at superconducting speeds (Clery, DNA goes electric Science 267: pp. 1270, 1995) . Another unique property of nucleic acids is based on recent electron micrographs showing DNA in the tertiary structure of a toroid (Hud NV, Downing KH, Balhorn R. A constant radius of curvature model for the organization of DNA in toroidal condensates, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 92: 3581-3585, 1995) . A mechanism is proposed for the resonances between energy fields of consciousness and the energetic template of DNA. Such a mechanism is supported by recent experimental evidence for an energetic template of DNA using laser correlation spectroscopy (Poponin V The DNA phantom effect: direct measurement of a new field in the vacuum substructure J. Nanobiology, 1998 (accepted for publication)). Individuals who could generate different intentional states of consciousness focused their intention to either unwind or wind the two strands which make up the DNA helix. Conformational changes were measured by standard biochemical methods using UV absorption spectroscopy at 260 nm. For a typical experiment eight aliquots of human placental DNA (Sigma Chemical Co, St. Louis) were transferred to identical sealed test tubes giving a final concentration of 20ug/ml distilled water. Four aliquots were measured before treatment and four aliquots were measured immediately after a 15 minute treatment. Control experiments were done exactly the same except the tubes were left on the benchtop instead of receiving a treatment. Control samples showed a natural tendency to unwind with an increase in absorption of 1.09 % +/- 0.8. Samples treated with the conscious intention to unwind DNA caused a larger increase in absorption from 2-10% depending on the experiment. Samples treated with the intention to wind DNA produced a decrease in absorption from 2-5 %. These effects, which are statistically significant, indicate that DNA is sensitive to the informational content of consciousness and support the hypothesis presented here.
According to the New Scientist of 13 Febraury 1999, Jacqueline Barton and her colleagues at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena published an article in Chemistry & Biology (vol 6, number 2, p 85) in which they show that single electrons can shoot far enough along DNA to influence gene activity. Last year Barton and her colleagues showed that electrons can pass through short stretches of DNA by hopping between the overlapping electron clouds of adjacent nucleotide bases, the molecular building blocks of DNA. Together, the disc-shaped electron clouds of each individual base form stacks which serve as an electron-rich pathway for conducting electrical signals. This time, they found that signals could span 60-base chunks of DNA 20 nanometres long, a stretch long enough to code for 20 amino acids. DNA promoters, the molecular "switches" that turn on adjacent genes, are typically this length. The team concluded that in theory, there is no limit to the distance signals could travel along DNA. But the team also found that specific sequences of DNA bases will stop the signals. These "insulating" regions consist of single or multiple pairings between the two DNA bases adenine (A) and thymine (T). "They serve as electronic hinges in the circuit," Barton says.
Katritch, Bednar, Michoud, Scharien, Dubochet, and Staslak, (Nature 384 (14 Nov 96) 142 and 114) show that for a given knot, there is an ideal form that is practically the form whereby the shortest tube of given radius can form the knot. They find that knotted DNA seems to occur in such an ideal form. Understanding the genetic code information structure of DNA and the interrelationships of carbon-DNA-based life forms should not only lead to medical advances, but also to understanding of information structures used in other forms of life.
Optical Tachyons in Parametric Amplifiers: How Fast Can Quantum Information Travel?, by Kurizki, Kozhekin, Kofman, and Blaauboer, quant-ph/9805040, discusses examples of superluminal (faster-than-c) group velocities, which express the peak advancement of electromagnetic pulses reshaped by material media:
The Chiao Group at Berkeley is investigating superluminality. Ryan Frewin, Renee George, Deborah Paulson have a web page about superluminality, in which they say: "...
William D. Walker, in physics/0001063, has shown "... that electromagnetic near-field waves and wave groups, generated by an oscillating electric dipole, propagate much faster than the speed of light as they are generated near the source, and reduce to the speed of light at about one wavelength from the source. The speed at which wave groups propagate (group speed) is shown to be the speed at which both modulated wave information and wave energy density propagate. Because of the similarity of the governing partial differential equations, two other physical systems (magnetic oscillating dipole, and gravitational radiating oscillating mass) are noted to have similar results. ...".
According to Physics News Update Number 598 #1, 17 July 2002, by Phil Schewe, James Riordon, and Ben Stein: "... Australian researchers have experimentally shown that microscopic systems (a nano-machine) may spontaneously become more orderly for short periods of time--a development that would be tantamount to violating the second law of thermodynamics, if it happened in a larger system. ... The new experiment also potentially has important ramifications for an understanding of the mechanics of life on the scale of microbes and cells. ... The researchers used optical tweezers to grab hold of a micron-sized bead and drag it through water. By measuring the motion of the bead and calculating the minuscule forces on it, the researchers were able to show that the bead was sometimes kicked by the water molecules in such a way that energy was transferred from the water to the bead. In effect, heat energy was extracted from the reservoir and used to do work (helping to move the bead) in apparent violation of the second law ... the second law is not entirely valid for systems as large as the bead-and-water experiment, and for periods on the order of seconds ... a cubic micron of water contains about thirty billion molecules. ... nanoscale machines ... may even end up running backwards for brief periods due to the counterintuitive energy flow. The research may also be important to biologists because many of the cells and microbes they study comprise systems comparable in size to the bead-and-water experiment. (G.M. Wang et al., Physical Review Letters, 29 July 2002.) ...".
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