All human beings have similar organs, but each organ has qualities unique to itself and to the person it belongs to. Research has revealed that even some of the genes of monozygotic twins are different [1]. As opposed to the previous assumption that “when it comes to DNA, every cell in the body is essentially identical to every other cell,” it has been found that each cell has a DNA of its own [2]. This uniqueness originates from the fact that the order and number of molecules and proteins are different, which is valid for atoms and sub-atom particles as well. Having spent countless hours on microscopes and spectroscopes, a university professor of mine once said, “I witnessed different structures of iron atom each time I observed one. We even need to produce a separate periodic table for the iron element alone.”

We also witness that particles have been created uniquely, just like human beings are. From the micro universe (one millionth of a meter) down to femto universe (one quadrillionth of a meter), each particle is called a boson or fermion. When particles are examined to find out in what conditions they resemble each other in the femto universe, doors of a new world will be opened in terms of knowledge and contemplation. According to this new perspective, while the things and events are sometimes explained through mathematical equations and formulations, they are sometimes explained through experiments of thought trying to attain the truth behind them. Pauli exclusion principle is one such experiment.

Pauli Principle

There are around 380 sub-atomic particles [3]. In atomic and subatomic dimensions, two fermions (e.g. two electrons) of an atom cannot have the same set of quantum numbers. Wolfgang Pauli first explained this principle in 1925 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945 after experiments proved that the theory was correct. This theory has gone down in history as the Pauli Exclusion Principle.

The motion equations of subatomic particles are expressed by their magnetic states. Pauli said that none of the electrons of an atom can share the same quantum state at the same time. In other words, two electrons in the same atom cannot share the physical features such as magnetism, motion, position and velocity in the same state [2].

In addition to the three quantum numbers (principal, subordinate, and magnetic quantum numbers) described so far, Pauli defined a quantum number for the spin of a fermion (e.g. electron). The spin quantum number is related to the rotation of the electron around its axis because an electron rotates around its own axis as it rotates around the atomic nucleus. According to the Pauli Principle, if an orbit has an electron with a spin of 1/2, an electron with a spin of -1/2 can be placed in the same orbit. If we assume that the spin of an electron rotating clockwise is 1/2 the spin of an electron rotating counterclockwise will be -1/2. Thus, with Pauli’s contribution, four quantum numbers were defined for subatomic particles and it was stated that even if the other three quantum numbers were the same, electrons with different spin quantum numbers could circulate in the same orbit.

The Pauli Principle shows that atoms are not identical. This principle also applies to solid crystals, that is, the materials we use daily. The Principle is also able to explain the fact that the ores that make up the element are different, and the fact that there are different elements in the periodic table. With this principle, important properties of superconductors have been discovered.

In 1927, based on the Pauli Principle, German physicist Karl Werner Heisenberg showed that it is not possible to measure the physical properties of a particle, such as the position and momentum, at the same time and that these results can only be expressed with uncertain probability and statistics [5].

This uniqueness also manifests itself in the space we call the macro world. Stars consisting of only neutrons are called neutron stars. A neutron star is very dense: its mass is 2–3 times that of the Sun, but only about 10 km in diameter. A neutron star should theoretically collapse into a black hole, but this does not happen. The reason for this, it has been discovered, is that neutrons that cannot share the same position prevent collapse and that neutron stars remain in balance [6].

The universe has been created with balance, and everything, from the minutest particles to the stars in the outer space, follows their particular courses to maintain the order.

References

1. scientificamerican.com/article/identical-twins-exhibit-d/
2. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090715131449.htm
3. lbl.gov/2017/listings/contents_listings.html
4. wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Pauli
5. phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/uncer.html
6. phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/pauli.html

It was only a decade ago that a phenomenon called the “Internet” came along and changed the way we communicated, did business and conducted our lives. Now, computer technology has become an essential and significant part of our daily lives. But how did it all start and where is it heading?

I entered the world of computers at an early age. I had an Atari 800 XL, the third version of the Atari introduced in 1983, and I was doing some basic programming. The computer contained a full 64K of memory, 1.8 MHz processing power (CPU), and looked like a bulky keyboard. I enjoyed spending a lot of time with games and programming; however I felt very limited with its capabilities. After more than 20 years, from time to time I still feel the same about my 2.8 GHz eight-core desktop computer with 8 GB of memory. While the computers are getting faster and more powerful, our need for computing power is also increasing just to complete our daily tasks at home and work. I always wondered how it all started and where we are heading with computer technology.

Over forty years ago, Gordon Moore, Intel Co-founder, predicted the number of transistors incorporated in a chip to double every 24 months. This is popularly known as Moore’s law, and used countless times by futurists [1] and science fiction writers. For the last half century, computer’s functionality and performance increased in line with Moore’s law, while costs are decreasing. However, fundamental barriers in semiconductor technology are emerging including the power needs and limits of manufacturing in atomic dimensions. Computer industry is already working on technologies to keep Moore’s Law alive.

Intel is already experimenting with 3D transistors that are smaller, faster and more energy efficient using a 22nm (nanometer, 10-12 m) manufacturing process compared to today’s 32nm systems. This will be a significant step forward to build more transistors onto silicon chips. Another approach will be by replacing the silicone in transistors. In 2010, IBM showcased a graphene transistor running at 100 GHz, with a potential of up to 1000 GHz. A graphene layer is only one atom thick with a honeycomb-like structure of carbon atoms. The graphene has unique electrical, optical, mechanical and thermal properties with promising applications in many industries.

In 1971, a theoretical prediction was made for the missing link in electronics, memristor, a fourth element to supplement resistor, capacitor and inductor, which form the basis of today’s electronic devices. HP’s demonstration in 2010 shows a resistor with memory that remembers the electric voltage applied even when the power is turned off. Requiring very little energy to store information promises to run ten times more power efficient and ten times faster than current counterparts.

In 1994, Leonard Adelman [2] proposed DNA computing to solve the famous, “shortest path problem”. Since then, many approaches have been made to utilize the properties of DNA for computing. In 2010, researchers at California Institute of Technology demonstrated a DNA computer, most advanced to date, which can calculate square roots. This approach could be put in use inside living organisms, and perform vital tasks such as disease detection. The promise of DNA computers depends on the parallel processing capabilities of DNA molecules that can try many possibilities at once with low power requirements [3]. Further advancements in DNA based computers in the coming decades will bring faster and low-powered computers to our daily lives.

In 1981, the famous physicist Richard Feynman speculated the possibility of computers obeying quantum mechanical laws that might best simulate the real-world quantum systems. This is a big challenge even for today’s fastest supercomputers. Since then, researchers are pacing towards building quantum computers that rely on quantum mechanics to conduct operations. Quantum computers can use properties like entanglement [4] and qubits. In entanglement, particles behave identically independent of the distance between them, and qubits act as both memory and state of the entanglement. Shor’s Algorithm, formulated by Peter Shor in 1994 for prime factorization is a powerful example of quantum computing that allows breaking encryption algorithms like RSA encryption more effectively and quickly than today’s super computers. Quantum computers can perform at much higher speeds than traditional computers, and are able to solve more complex problems. Recent developments in quantum computing such as quantum photonic chips [5], and first commercial quantum computer by D-Wave shows that we might be closer than we think to have our very own quantum computer in the coming decades.

While greater shift in computing might stem from the change in underlying technology in processing the information, computer form factors (desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, etc.) have a more direct effect in our daily use of computers. Human computer interaction changed significantly with the introduction of smartphones (e.g. iPhone, Android phones), and tablets (e.g. iPad), moving from keyboards and mouse as the primary input methods towards touch screens.

Today’s touch screens, although providing infinite ways of input structures available on their screens, lack tactile feedback when compared to keyboards. New keyboard designs with small screens on each key opens infinite customization of the input, but are still limited to initial design of the key (e.g. usually cubic). Recent developments in touchscreen designs enable users to feel clicks, vibrations and other tactile input by using “haptic technology”. Haptic technology takes advantage of the user’s sense of touch and provides feedback by applying forces, vibrations, or motions to the user. As seen in early prototypes, flexible screens and electronics will provide a more realistic feel for human computer interaction by shifting their forms to a specific shape (e.g. game pad, key, and wheel) in the coming decades.

Another level in human computer interaction even eliminates user’s touch. Apple introduced Siri, a smart virtual assistant, in 2011 as a part of their iOS operating system for iPhones and iPads. Siri is capable of analyzing user’s complex audio inputs to carry out many tasks including scheduling a meeting, creating a reminder, typing and sending SMS messages, and many other functions available in smart phones. Microsoft introduced Kinect in 2010, a motion-sensing device that enables users to control and interact with the game console using gestures and spoken commands. The Kinect interprets specific gestures by using an infrared projector and camera to track the movement of objects and individuals in three dimensions.

Samsung introduced a 46’’ transparent display using LCD technology in 2010, and demonstrated flexible displays in CES 2011. Transparent and flexible displays will easily find use in wearable electronics such as contact lenses and glasses. An obvious application of transparent display is Augmented Reality (AR) where information is displayed on top of real world images. While today’s smartphones and tablets allows augmented reality by combining information with the real-time video feed from the camera of the device, transparent display eliminates the need of using camera. Current AR technology includes head-mounted displays and virtual retinal displays for visualizing the information. It is widely applied in various areas including entertainment, advertising, game industry, navigation, education, military applications, and information sharing.

While having larger, transparent, and flexible displays in different forms, one direction in display technologies is to reduce the size or even eliminate the display through projection and holograms. Current trends in projectors include 3D projection, synchronization of multiple projections, and pico projectors. The world’s smallest glass lens (1mm x 1mm) introduced in 2011 will help minimize some of the problems of projectors such as size, power and heat, and improve their integration in smartphones and tablets.

Recent prototypes of holographic displays progressed significantly demonstrating 3D and full color animated images, since its first introduction at the MIT Media Lab 1989 [6]. While developments in 3D displays are promising, holography provides the best 3-D experience since it is closest to how we see our environment. A hologram uses an optical effect called “diffraction” to produce the light that would have come from an object, and makes the image of the object appear in front of the viewer. It is possible to view objects from different angles in holographic display by walking around them. Unlike other 3D display systems, holographic displays do not require special glasses for viewing and allows multiple viewers to experience the view from different angles at the same time. Future applications of holography can be implemented in health, entertainment and communication sectors, from 3D movies to telepresence applications.

All of the above examples and trends in computers deal with the computing as a product. Cloud computing can be defined as the delivery of computing as a service where shared resources, software, and information are provided over a network. Cloud computing describes a new delivery and consumption model that allows dynamic scalability and virtualization of resources. Users can dynamically upgrade the storage and computing power from virtualized resources on demand without hardware changes on the base system. Organizations can save from investing on expensive hardware, and human capital.

Many technologies from coming centuries are featured in science fiction books and movies such as Minority Report, Star Trek, and Star Wars. While some of them are already available to consumers, others might require decades to come. Motivation for the advancement in computer technologies usually stems from our needs and desires. At the same time, new technologies significantly impact consumer behavior and increase our dependence on new technologies. Our economy is structured such that all citizens have to consume more and more, even if that means disposing of perfectly good technological devices. Do we really need a new computer or phone every year? Most of us don’t.

Computer technologies are a significant part of our daily lives, and the line between the products and services is becoming thinner with the dependency on computers increasing in every aspect of our life. While improving the quality of our lives by making our daily tasks easier, computers and Internet technologies can affect us in different ways. It has already started to change how we read, write and even communicate with others. Many concerns are raised about the negative effects of the use of technology including Internet addiction, privacy, attention span, concentration, time consumption, anxiety, isolation, depression, digital security, communication disorder and various health issues. The challenge for us is to understand the benefits of the technology, have a balance in dependence and its use, and protect ourselves from its adverse effects.

Acknowledgment: This article is produced at Mergeous [7], an online article and project development service for authors and publishers dedicated to the advancement of technologies in the merging realms of science and religion.

References

1. Kaku, Michio. 2011. Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

2. Demir, Halil I. 2011. Super Computers in a Cell, The Fountain, Issue 80, March – April.

3. Adleman, Leonard M. 1994. “Molecular Computation of Solutions to Combinatorial Problems,” Science, 266 (11), 1021–1024.

4. Demir, Halil I. 2011. Quantum Worlds from Entanglement to Telepathy, The Fountain, Issue 84, November – December.

5. Shadbolt, P. J. et al., Generating, manipulating and measuring entanglement and mixture with a reconfigurable photonic circuit, arXiv:1108.3309v1 [quant-ph].

6. Hilaire, P. St., S. A. Benton, M. Lucente, M. L. Jepsen, J. Kollin, H. Yoshikawa and J. Underkoffler. 1990. “Electronic display system for computational holography.”In Practical Holography IV, Proceedings of the SPIE, volume 1212-20, pp. 174-182, Bellingham, WA. 7. Mergeous, Online article and project development platform, http://www.mergeous.com

“The most beautiful system [the universe] could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” (Isaac Newton)

The Newtonian physics, quantum mechanics, and the theory of relativity took the modern community to the boundary of the two realms of physical and metaphysical existence. Nevertheless, the nature of the fundamental physical dimensions still remains an open question resting on the related areas of science

The fundamental concepts of Newtonian physics are Time, Length, Mass, and Electric Charge by means of which all the other classical physical quantities such as velocity, force, momentum, energy, current, electric field, magnetic flux, etc. can be derived and expressed as their combinations. Classical physics stands on the assumption that material, having two basic intrinsic properties of mass and charge, and immaterial phenomena are all contained in an absolute space and an ever-flowing absolute time. These four physical dimensions, without asking the nature of them, provide a practical framework for a description of the gravitational and electromagnetic forces and thus a description of the physical world and an interpretation of the events occurring in it up to a certain degree. However, the Newtonian picture of the universe is neither adequate for a deeper understanding of the corporeal reality nor appropriate for linking that reality to the ones possessing higher degrees of the Universal Existence.

Starting from late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Newtonian picture of the world has been changed due to two revolutionary theories, which have been proved both experimentally and theoretically that they are superior to and not compatible with the classical descriptions and assumptions. They are the relativity theory and the quantum mechanics. In physics, a field is a physical quantity associated with each point of Space-Time. For example, the Newtonian gravitational field is a vector field specifying its value at a point in Space-Time, which requires three numbers, the components of the gravitational field vector at that point. Quantum field theory constructing quantum mechanical models of systems classically parameterized by an indefinitely big number of degrees of freedom, namely fields, is the natural and quantitative language of particle physics. The current set of fundamental fields and their dynamics are summarized in a theory called the Standard Model. All particles and their interactions observed to date can be described almost entirely by the Standard Model although most particle physicists believe that it is an incomplete description of nature, and that a more fundamental theory, the Theory of Everything, awaits discovery. Figure 1 represents an overview of the various families of elementary and composite particles, and the theories describing their interactions.

The relativistic quantum field theory of the subatomic world does not only include the strong and weak nuclear forces in addition to the electromagnetic and gravitational interactions of the classical picture, but also provokes some ideas about the nature of the fundamental concepts of the classical physics. Symmetry of a physical system is a physical or mathematical feature of the system that is preserved under some change. The Standard Model says, for instance, that the electric charge is the generator of the U(1) symmetry of electromagnetism. U(1), the unitary group of rank 1, is the simplest internal symmetry group of the Standard Model. It can be visualized as the rotational symmetry of a circle about a perpendicular axis passing through the center of the circle. It represents a continuous symmetry because a circle can be rotated by an angle and remains unchanged. It is an internal symmetry since this circle does not lie in the physical space but in the complex plane of mathematics. More abstractly and more generally, a charge is any generator of a continuous symmetry of the physical system under study. When a physical system has a symmetry of some sort, Noether’s theorem implies the existence of a conserved current. The thing that flows in the current is the charge; the charge is the generator of the symmetry group. This converts our classical concrete idea of electric charge into a mathematical abstraction. Conservation of energy and conservations of linear and angular momenta are nothing but the applications of Noether’s theorem to the translational symmetry in time and translational and rotational symmetries in space, respectively.

Classically, which is equivalent to macroscopically, mass is associated with matter and can be defined as a quantitative measure of an object’s resistance to the change of its speed. But in the Standard Model of the subatomic scale, the mass of the elementary particles are explained by the Higgs mechanism which refers specifically to the generation of masses for the W and Z bosons through electroweak symmetry breaking. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is currently searching for Higgs bosons, and attempting to understand the electroweak Higgs mechanism. The Higgs mechanism is the process that gives mass to elementary particles. In 1905, Einstein proposed mass-energy equivalence (E=mc2) in his paper entitled “Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy-content?” In relativity, all of the energy that moves with an object (that is, all the energy which is present in the object’s rest frame) contributes to the total mass of the body, which measures how much it resists acceleration.

When we come to the remaining two fundamental concepts of Newtonian physics, we see that Time and Length, which we know instinctively, are no exceptions. The modern physics challenges our classical understandings of them too. Relativity theory argues that Time and Space are of equal ontological status; the reality is the 4-dimensional unity of Space-Time. Physics could no longer be understood as Space by itself, and Time by itself. It also states that simultaneity is relative, so there is no objective way to define a “Now” that would be the same for all states of motion which substantially affects the idea of causality. In addition, this Space-Time is not flat but rather curved due to the material and energy contained in it and not static but dynamic. Time and Space are neither uniform nor absolute.

The missing part of the so-called Theory of Everything is the quantum gravity, which attempts to develop scientific models that unify quantum mechanics describing three of the four known fundamental interactions with general relativity describing the fourth, gravity. The following quotation is from one of the leading quantum gravity researcher, Carlo Rovelli, stated in 1997:

“I believe that we are going through a period of profound confusion, in which we lack a general coherent picture of the physical world capable of embracing what or at least most of what, we have learned about it. The fundamental scientific view of the world of the present time is characterized by an astonishing amount of perplexity, and disagreement, about what time, space, matter, and causality are. But if a new synthesis is to be reached, I believe that philosophical thinking will be once more one of its ingredients. Due to the vastness of the problem involved, the generality and accuracy of philosophical thinking and its capacity to clarify conceptual premises are probably necessary to help physics out of a situation in which we have learned so much about the world, but no longer know what matter, time, space, and causality are.“

Lee Smolin, another theoretical physicist named as #21 on Foreign Policy Magazine’s 2008 list of Top 100 Public Intellectuals, stated the following in 2001:

“Atoms do fall, so the relationship between gravity and the quantum is not a problem for nature. If it is a problem for us, it must be because somewhere in our thinking there is at least one, and possibly several, wrong assumptions. At the very least, these assumptions involve our concept of space and time and the connection between the observer and the observed.”

It is true that quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity were born and are growing in the nontraditional atmosphere of the scientific enterprise. Thus, they can be considered as sharing the reductionist character of the Newtonian physics by having no direct reference to the hierarchy of physical and metaphysical existence. Nevertheless, we consider them as an improvement since they took the modern scientific community to the boundary of the two realms, by asking the old question of ancients about the nature of the fundamental physical dimensions. The mystery of them is still an open question resting, we believe, on the related areas of science and metaphysics.

Quantum entanglement is an interesting phenomenon. Two or more quantum particles can be linked together in a special way; this makes them behave like one entity. A change in one of the constituent particles can instantly be observed in the other, independent of the distance between the particles. This phenomenon was called “entanglement” by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger. The basics of quantum entanglement (1) and quantum computers (2) are discussed in recent articles in The Fountain magazine. Some physicists (3, 4, 5) explain this phenomenon by suggesting that the two entangled particles are actually a single particle that can be observed from two different locations in the universe at the same time point, as if they have been created to appear as a pair. At the quantum level, the definitions of space and time become obscure. An atom can be in two distant locations at the same time, but this may not be the case for a paper clip. What about dozens or thousands of atoms? Where is the line between atoms and a paper clip?

Entanglement has already been experimented on atoms (6) and observed in biological systems at room temperatures. A recent study (7) found the first evidence of biological organisms showing strange quantum behaviors. Researchers from UC Berkeley believe that they have observed quantum entanglement occurring in photosynthesis. The possibility of using these molecules for quantum information processing at room temperature may open the doors for photosynthetic quantum computers. This finding could lead to solar cells that are more efficient than today’s photovoltaic cells.

Quantum entanglement has many areas of application, including secure encryption (8), ultra-fast quantum computers (9), ghost imaging (10), teleportation (11), and perhaps the most interesting one, telepathy (12). Telepathy is described as the transfer of thought or feeling from one person to another without using known channels of communication. Fredric W. H. Myers, founder of the Society for Psychical Research, coined the term, telepathy, in 1882 to replace the earlier expression thought-transference. Telepathy is one of the main branches of parapsychological research, and has been studied to try to detect, understand, and utilize phenomena (13). It is often accepted that there is a connection between telepathy and other paranormal phenomena, such as precognition, clairvoyance and empathy. The existence of telepathy has been confirmed through many scientific experiments (12). However there is no accepted mechanism that explains how telepathy works. It remains controversial and is not widely accepted by scientists.

It is always appealing to perceive a phenomenon as happening from nothing or without a cause, as often happens in movies or dreams. But is this realistic? There are many mechanisms, structures, and reactions we can observe in nature which cannot be understood with our current knowledge. One can quickly make a list of things that cannot be explained by science today. It is believed that there is a cause and effect relation, and a reasonable explanation for everything in this universe. Some will push this further to offer an incredible prize for an opposite claim. The JREF (James Randi Educational Foundation) has offered a one-million-dollar prize (14) to the person who can show (under proper experimental conditions) evidence of any paranormal or supernatural event. They will remove telepathy from the list of supernatural events if it can be achieved during a controlled experiment.

Some researchers claim that there is a connection between quantum theory and telepathy. One theory is that the human mind has abilities that influence and receive “quantum fluctuations” from other minds. Another theory explains this instantaneous communication with quantum entanglement. Gao Shen, at the Institute of Quantum Physics in Beijing, China, has conducted experiments (12) to understand this connection by monitoring synchronous EEG patterns between two hypothetically “entangled” minds.

There are many natural events in our daily life that might seem like telepathy. You might hear something from one of your friends or relatives, for example, that they can perceive a phenomenon like an injury or illness to a close person from a distance. Many people claim that they have this kind of experience, especially twins with one another, or mothers and children. Are all these people in close relationships-twins, couples, siblings, parent and child-also sharing quantum entangled particles?

Humans are not the only subjects that show telepathic properties. It has reported (15) that intact double-stranded DNA has an ability to recognize similarities in other DNA strands. This recognition occurs between sequences of several hundred nucleotides without physical contact or the presence of proteins. The way they identify one another and combine chemically is not fully understood. This behavior can be observed in water that contains no proteins or other material that could interfere with the reaction. There needs to be some sort of communication, attraction or guidance between individual DNA strands to explain this behavior. Do these DNA strands communicate through entangled particles?

Could this telepathic behavior of DNA be the explanation of the power of extra sensory perception between people close to each other? Are we all entangled with one another with invisible bonds, existing since the time of Adam and Eve? Is it all because of the genetic inheritance in our DNA? Do our actions affect others, even if we have no direct connection or relation to them? Maybe all the living things and our lives in this universe are a part of a single mechanism, guided and connected in a special way we cannot understand with our current scientific knowledge.

Einstein pointed (16) out the illusion of separateness: “A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe’; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as someone separated from the rest’a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

All these intriguing features of the quantum world can promise new ways of communication, including telepathy. Recent developments in quantum physics, observing entanglement in atoms and biological systems, mysterious communication between DNA strands, and telepathic connection between humans are all pieces of an unsolved puzzle. When we think about how we perceive this world with our known physical senses, and how it might be with other unknown perspectives, we can then wonder what percentage of things in our universe we have not been able to see or know. There is a long way to go before understanding the universe with our limited perspectives and physical senses.

Acknowledgment: This article was produced in MERGEOUS (17), an online article and project development service for authors and publishers dedicated to the advancement of technologies in the merging realm of science and religion.

References

(1) S. Candaroglu, “Quantum Entanglement: Illusion or Reality?”. Fountain, Issue 61 January – February, 2008.

(2) O. D. Ikramoglu, “Quantum-Inspired World of Computers: Science or Fiction?”. Fountain, Issue 74, March – April, 2010.

(3) M. A. Nielsen and I. L. Chuang, Quantum Information and Quantum Computing (Cambridge U. Press, 2000).

(4) Ryszard Horodecki, Pawe Horodecki, Micha Horodecki, Karol Horodecki, Rev. Mod. Phys. 81, 865-942 (2009).

(5) M. Genovese, Cosmology and entanglement, Adv. Sci. Lett. 2, 303-309 (2009).

(6) S. Olmschenk, D.N. Matsukevich, P. Maunz, D. Hayes, L. M. Duan, C. Monroe, “Quantum Teleportation Between Distant Matter Qubits”. Science, 323, 5913, 486-489, 2009.

(7) M. Sarovar, A. Ishizaki, G. R. Fleming, K. B. Whaley, “Quantum entanglement in photosynthetic light harvesting complexes”. arXiv:0905.3787v1 (quant-ph), 2009.

(8) H. K. Lo, and N. Lutkenhaus, “Quantum Cryptography: from Theory to Practice”. arXiv:quantph/0702202, 2007.

(9) D. P. DiVincenzo, “Quantum Computation”. Science, 270, 5234, 255-261. doi:10.1126/science.270.5234.255, 1995.

(10) M. D’Angelo, Y.H. Kim, S.P. Kulik, Y. Shih, “Identifying entanglement using quantum ghost interference and imaging”, Physical review letters, 2004.

(11) D. Bouwmeester, J.W. Pan, K. Mattle, M. Eibl, H. Weinfurter, A. Zeilinger, “Experimental Quantum Teleportation”. Nature, 390, 6660, 575-579, 1997.

(12) S. Gao, “A Primary Quantum Model of Telepathy”. 2003. (Preprint)

(13) Wikipedia, Telepathy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepathy.

(14) James Randi Educational Foundation, “One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge”, Available online http://www.randi.org/research/index.html

(15) G. S. Baldwin, N. J. Brooks, R. E. Robson, A. Wynveen, A. Goldar, S. Leikin, J. M. Seddon, and A. A. Kornyshev, “DNA Double Helices Recognize Mutual Sequence Homology in a Protein Free Environment”. The Journal of Physical Chemistry B, 112, 4, 1060-1064, 2008.

(16) Elise’s collection of favorite quotes, http://elise.com/quotes/

(17) Mergeous, Online article and project development service, http://www.mergeous.com/

Is life unpredictable? Do we choose our own thoughts or our own path through this life? Are we beings who truly have the free will to decide which path we will take or which choice we will make? Or do we live and breathe in a completely deterministic world? Are we merely an aggregation of particles that react and respond in predictable ways? Most scientists would agree that on the atomic level there is a certain amount of predictability, but what about the curious behavior of particles on the subatomic or quantum level? And what does this strange behavior have to do with us?

Here, let us explore the quantum theory and what it might be able to tell us about ourselves and how we interact with the people and the world around us. If we live in a world where the behavior of particles cannot be predicted, then can we conclude from this that human beings and the human mind are just as unpredictable as quantum particles? We met with Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Charles Townes in Berkeley California. Townes is the inventor of the maser (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) which led to the laser, something that has changed our world in profound ways. He received the Templeton Award.

Scientific discoveries

Matter & Beyond: The spirit of adventure, this wanting to wander from the beaten path, do you think that this goes hand in hand with being not only a scientist, but a scientist such as yourself who makes incredible discoveries?

Well I think exploration and trying to see new things and look at things that other people haven’t seen are all part of invention and a part of scientific discovery. So you need that attitude of exploration.

M&B: In your book How the Laser Happened you mention some responses when you started talking to people about your initial theories. Ike Bowen said, “Well, I’m very sorry to tell you but I don’t think radio waves are ever going to tell us anything about astronomy.”

Yes. Ike Bowen was a very famous professor and very intelligent; he’s done excellent astronomy and so on, but he didn’t think radio waves would work. One of the things you have to do to explore is to try things other people don’t think will work. There are many times in my life when I’ve done that. For example, when I was trying to build the first maser, I was told by two Nobel Laureates, “oh look, that’s not going to work, we know it’s not going to work, you know it’s not going to work, you have to stop; it’s a waste of money and time.”

M&B: Isn’t this an example of how some scientists box themselves in by trying to measure what is unknown only with what is known?

Yes, it’s very common that people close their eyes to really new things. But one should be able to disagree if you think there really may be something there; you should try it out. That’s what I did. I tried it out, and radio astronomy has turned out to be a very important field.

M&B: You had this feeling about it, but Ike Bowen didn’t.

I was rather more familiar with radio waves and microwaves than Dr. Bowen was. That may be part of it; but one’s instinct is also involved. Where do revelations come from? Where do new thoughts come from? It was something that I thought might be there, but I did know a little more about microwaves than he did.

M&B: Looking back what would you tell fellow scientists – would you give them advice based on this?

Perhaps my advice is think about the things you think might pay off and don’t be too persuaded by what other people think. Be willing to differ with other people, but think very carefully about what you’re doing. Be sure that you think it’s likely to work.

Religious discoveries

M&B: In addition to the Nobel Prize you have also won the prestigious Templeton Award. How did you become interested in this dialogue between science and religion?

Firstly, I’m both religiously oriented and scientifically oriented. In spite of many apparent conflicts between the two, in my mind there is no actual conflict. They’re much more consistent with each other than people think; in fact they help each other. Each can learn something about one from the other, and I felt it was time to point this out to people and emphasize it.

M&B: According to what you say in your acceptance speech for the Templeton Award, you started expressing your ideas about science and religion as early as the 1960s?

First I was asked to give a talk about it and then I wrote an article. It eventually became very, very popular and I was asked to give many more talks. So my ideas began to spread and I think this had an important affect on thinking at the time; this is why I received the Templeton Award.

M&B: Were you surprised at the reaction you received to this article?

I was surprised how fascinated people were about it, yes. In fact, it was the editor of Think Magazine who telephoned me and asked me if they could publish it. Think is a publication by IBM. I said, “all right; if you’d like to publish it that’s okay.” So he published it, then everybody began to read it and wanted to publish it in other places. I was impressed how interested people were; I was also pleased. I thought it was very important to try to understand the correlation between science and religion. Both are very important to us and to understand the correlation between them is important.

M&B: Where do you think the popularity of this comes from? This obviously resonates in many people.

I think religion is very important to many people, as it is to me, and science is important too; religious people want to try to understand it. They’re also pleased to learn that a scientist thinks that science and religion are consistent with one another; they want to learn more about such ideas.

M&B: Would you like to comment on the limits of scientific knowledge versus the limits of spiritual or religious knowledge?

Both are limited, as I have mentioned before. A set of assumptions are made and we use logic to try to derive things from that; but we can never be sure that these assumptions are consistent. Now, in addition we know that there are many puzzles in science. We are finding fantastic things. For example, many scientists, including Einstein, didn’t think the universe could have a beginning. Of course how could it possibly have a beginning; it couldn’t have started from nothing. Now we know the discovery of the “Big Bang.” The universe did indeed have a beginning. That was previously a religious view, but not a scientific view. Now suddenly we learn it had a beginning and this shows that science can shed some light on religion.

M&B: So what do you think are the most important and fundamental human questions; perhaps the top three?

A: Well, I suppose the most fundamental and human question is the meaning of life. Why are we here and what should we do? The meaning of life is a very important and interesting question. How did life begin, why is the world the way it is? We know the universe has to be almost exactly the way it is for us to be here, but how did it turn out to be that way? So there are many very basic and interesting questions, and of course how we should live depends on what we think this is all about. These are very fundamental and interesting questions.

M&B: Some say that science answers the “how” and religion answers the “why.” How do you react to this statement?

It’s something like that. I would say science is an examination of what the world is like, or what the universe is like. Even humans: science tells us what we are like and how we work. Religion examines what the purpose and meaning of the universe is, as well as that of humans and human life is. If there is a purpose and meaning, they must have something to do with what we’re like, and what we do, and so on. How we work must have something to do with this purpose and meaning, and so, if we understand one very thoroughly maybe we will be able to understand the other.

M&B: What can science learn from religion and what can religion learn from science?

I think some religious people have been too absolutist. Some scientists are too absolute as well. They think; science really understands that, this is all there is and nothing else. I think in both cases we should recognize that we don’t understand everything and must be ready to change our views to some extent. Maybe in general we know what is approximately right, but we must recognize that we don’t understand everything. Actually, religion has helped science and vice-versa at various times.

M&B: Could you give us some examples from the past about how religion and science interacted.

I would have to say that I believe science was a result of religion, and religion was monotheistic with a single God who created this universe and planned it. This has substantially affected early scientific views. The Greeks, for example, felt they could figure out what the world was like just from logic – they thought that it had to be a certain way and they thought about it using logic, trying to figure out what the world was like. Now, if there’s a God who created the universe, then God created the universe and made it the way He wanted it. So let’s find out what it’s like; if God created the world, then it should be consistent and reliable. So that, I think, was the background for the beginning of basic science. What is this universe really like and is it consistent, can we rely on it and predict it? So the religious idea of a single God that created the universe was basic to the beginning of science, or at least European science.

M&B: So that’s how religion inspired scientific questions. And how does science shed light on religion?

The Greeks, as I said, thought they could figure out everything just from logic, without observations. Now we have observations, we have to see what the world is like. As we learn what it is like this will shed some light on its purpose and meaning. I’ve already mentioned that we have discovered that there was a beginning of all things. We are able to understand more and more over recent years. The laws of science have to be almost exactly as they are if we are to be here. Atomic forces and electromagnetic forces have to be almost exactly the way they are for the chemicals that we need for our bodies to be here. Nuclear forces and gravitation have to be almost exactly the way they are for the stars to be here and to last so long. The sun, for example, is here for billions of years, shining on us and keeping us alive. Our life depends on the laws of science; they have to be almost exactly the way they are. We recognize that now; but why are they this way? Well, that’s the origin of the expression “intelligent planning.” Somehow it was planned, (intelligent planning) to make it come out this way, why else would it be otherwise?

M&B: But still, there are some alternative explanations as well.

Some people think that maybe there are billions and billions of different universes and each one is a little different. Well, that’s a possibility, but why would the laws of science differ from one universe to the other and so on? That’s an arbitrary assumption, but maybe. Otherwise one has to say: gee, maybe it was planned. For everything to come out exactly this way will shed some light; perhaps this was a planned and created universe. Science and religion interact and shed some light on one another; and I think as we learn more about each they will interact more.

Undiscovered territories: quantum mechanics and free will

M&B: With the birth of the quantum theory, there are some religious people who say that this gives us a clue into the true nature of reality. They have made the leap and they’re saying that our perception of something actually changes the nature of it. Would you like to comment on this?

Quantum mechanics describes how atoms and molecules behave and so on; that’s very important to us. But quantum mechanics is very puzzling in many ways. It’s really changed our views of what physics is like and what the world is like, fundamentally and philosophically. But it’s also very puzzling because it says that if you send a small particle through a hole, it may go this way or that way, and one can never know which way it goes until you look at it. But before you look at it, it may be here and it may be there, or it may continue to be in a combination of both places; but once you look at it, then it’s definitely there as you see it. Now why humans – why the observations of humans – have such an important effect, that’s a little puzzling. What role is it that humans really play in deciding just where the atom is and so on? In any case, quantum mechanics is a really remarkable and strange phenomenon which we don’t understand at all. It says that things are unpredictable and it’s changed our ideas of a deterministic world to one of a non-deterministic world. It is non-deterministic and one can never predict what it will do exactly.

M&B: Could you explain this to somebody who is really not a scientific person; do you think you could walk me through it?

Well, maybe. Now if we throw a baseball, once we see it start going we think we know what way it will go. But if we throw an atom, then quantum mechanics says that’s not predictable. It even says the baseball isn’t completely predictable, but it’s almost predictable. So it’s predictable with a precision we can measure. But for an atom, which has a much smaller mass, it’s not predictable and it may go this way, up, down, left, right. The laws of physics says that it can go all these different ways and we don’t know which way it’s going until we actually measure it. If we detect the atom here, then we know, “okay, it’s going this way.” But until that time, the atom is maybe in all these different places at the same time or at least in any one of them. We don’t know. Now that also means that in a sense all of life is unpredictable. We are made of atoms and these atoms do things. So, while we can assume roughly what’s going to happen in life we don’t know for sure.

M&B: Some people are making the leap, suggesting that because of the laws in quantum mechanics one’s thoughts somehow interact with the macro world. How would you respond to that?

There is no evidence of that at all. I don’t think quantum mechanics allows that. I know people have thought: well maybe this will allow some new things of that type, but it doesn’t. As noted earlier, one of the great problems is free will. How can we have free will and what is consciousness and what is free will? Science doesn’t allow free will, but that doesn’t mean that science is complete. Our present science doesn’t allow free will and we should recognize that. If we have free will then there is something new and different that we have yet to understand.

M&B: Some people think that the principle of uncertainty is a basis for free will; what are the arguments and counter arguments to this?

It is sometimes thought that because of the principle of uncertainty things are not predictable; this gives us a freedom of choice. But it doesn’t. We have a theory that’s being developed which shows how we can test whether or not there can be any outside force of any kind coming in to affect quantum mechanics; we carry out experiments that show that this cannot be. Thus, we do not have free will in accordance with our present understanding of science. It’s tempting to think that maybe this is not the case, but unfortunately it is.

M&B: Well, when you say that science doesn’t allow free will, my first thought is “so what? as a human being can I not decide that I want to live my life this way as opposed to that way ?

A present understanding is that science doesn’t allow free will. There has to be some new laws, something new, perhaps a new dimension somehow, a spiritual dimension or some new dimension. Something has to be happening if we have free will. Maybe we don’t have free will; however, if we really believe that we have free will, there must be something completely new that we don’t understand. This is an example of science and religion interacting and shedding light on one another. Our belief that we are able to decide this way or that is just an illusion; we merely think that we’re making a decision. There’s also the question of what is it that leads us to make a decision, where is this thing? Where is the human you envision? How do you define a human, where and what is this thing that has free will?

M&B: Do you believe that we can be reduced to being kind of a skin encapsulated computer, just a brain sitting on top of our shoulders?

Personally, I think we have free will. Most people think we have free will, even if science doesn’t allow for it. I am only saying that there is something new here we don’t understand; we have to go on from there.

M&B: What most excites you at the present time?

Well, I’m more and more impressed by what a wonderful world this is. I’m very curious and I’d like to learn more about it and have better instincts and more insight into it. It is truly remarkable.

Interview conducted by Mustafa Tabanli for Ebru TV for the Emmy Award winning television series Matter and Beyond. For more information and the full episodes visit http://www.ebru.tv

How about quantum computers? Quantum computers make use of a quantum mechanical phenomenon, so-called quantum superposition (being in different states simultaneously). Classically, voltage across a circuit element can be either positive or negative when measured by a voltmeter, but not simultaneously negative and positive. Could it somehow be possible to be in both states simultaneously?

Quantum superposition

For electrical circuits, the answer is obviously no. In microscopic scales of single atoms, or photons (i.e., single quantized packets that constitutes the light beam), however, the answer is yes. Consider an optical component, for instance, that splits an incoming light beam into two beams of equal intensity. In optics, such a device is called a 50/50-beam splitter. You can ask what happens when a single photon is sent to such a beam splitter. Since a single photon cannot be split in this simple experiment, you might expect that it would either be transmitted or reflected with equal probability . Experiments, however, show that this is not actually true in the single photon level. The single photon is indeed simultaneously reflected and transmitted.

Once microscopic quantum superposition is brought into our macroscopic world, we can imagine many interesting phenomena. Simultaneously occupying many different places and being dead and alive at the same time are only two of them. Of course such technology, especially applied to humans is highly science fiction, given current experimental and theoretical challenges. Nevertheless, quantum superposition has a strikingly interesting similarity with the spiritual states already achievable by saints, such that they can be available in more than one place at a given time or become dead and alive, in the sense that they live both in the future and in the past.

It is not known exactly why quantum superposition exists, but what we know is that it is a necessary ingredient for our complex universe to perform its vital functions in a finite amount of time. Quantum superposition principle reflects the great wisdom and power of the Omnipotent. Similar to the single photon example above, with this principle, God gives the underlying particles of the universe an immense power to achieve many tasks simultaneously. Otherwise, regarding the finite age of the universe (about 15 billion years), our physical universe and the events taking place all around us would not come into existence. The Quantum superposition principle has also inspired researchers to build unprecedentedly fast computers to solve the problems that are intractable with any classical computing method. In this article, we introduce this new strategy to computing.

Quantum computing with superposition

Having provided some background about the quantum superposition, we ask the question “How could we exploit quantum superposition for fast computing?” Below we will give a glimpse of that power. Consider a three-bit register. It can only store one out of eight numbers in the set, {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7}, in a given moment of time. For example, number 5 is stored in a three-bit register as “101.” Now suppose that these three bits are replaced by their quantum cousins, so-called qubits (short for quantum bit). You can imagine, for example, a quantum register consisting of three rubidium (Rb) atoms. These individual atoms can be prepared in the 0 and 1 logical states simultaneously by shining a laser beam for a certain amount of time. Then it is possible for three atoms combined to be prepared in a superposition of eight numbers, which is impossible classically. In other words all those eight guys physically exist in the same room, although it doesn’t allow more than one guy to fit classically. If we want to make operations on all of these numbers, we don’t need to perform serially; instead, we can achieve that in only one computational step on a single hardware. Thus, quantum superposition leads to a massive parallelism, which renders the computational complexity (i.e., a measure of how efficiently a given problem could be solved) highly reduced for various difficult problems in computer science.

For example, let’s consider RSA, a well-known algorithm (i.e., a set of instructions to solve a problem on a computer) for secure communication that was invented by Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman, hence the name, in 1977 at MIT. It is widely used in electronic commerce protocols. The details of RSA are out of scope in this article (See the FAQ section of the RSA Laboratories’ web site in Ref. [1] for a brief introduction to RSA). Here, we only want to mention its vulnerability to quantum computers if they were to exist. The security of the RSA cryptosystem relies on the difficulty of factoring large numbers, which is intractable with classical computers. Factorization for small numbers, say 15, is quite simple. When the number of digits increase up to a few 100s, for example, enormous computational resource is required. RSA Laboratories publish the RSA challenge numbers (see Ref. [2] for the list of challenge numbers and the prize) on their web site to test the security of their algorithm at various key lengths. The largest integer, RSA-640, which has 193 decimal digits (640 bits), was factorized recently by F. Bahr, et al. The next challenge number in turn is RSA-704, and the prize is $30,000. Imagine factorizing a 1000-digit number. You would probably be a considerably rich person in just a few minutes, if you had a moderate quantum computer and the RSA Laboratories kept feeding you with new challenge numbers, because the factorization of such a large number with current computational resources takes forever, perhaps even more than the estimated age of the universe. Of course, the RSA Laboratories will not let you be very rich, by simply quitting posting new challenge numbers. They would be interested in your quantum computer, though.

How does the quantum computer crack the world’s most secure cryptosystems with little effort? One can construct new algorithms for quantum computers based on above described principle of superposition. These algorithms can take the outcome of previous calculations and input them as a superposition to the next stage of the instructions, which results in a highly efficient form of computing (please consult Ref [3] to have for a simple explanation of quantum superposition for fast computation). In 1994, Peter Shor from AT&T’s Bell Labs in New Jersey just did that. He developed the world’s first quantum algorithm, which efficiently performs factorization. In 1996, Lov Grover also at Bell Labs invented the unstructured database (i.e., a disordered list such as a list of city names not in alphabetical order) search algorithm for quantum computers, so-called Grover’s algorithm.

Suppose that there is a basket with ten balls in it. You are now asked to find a specific one with your eyes closed, say red. It is known, however, beforehand that there is only one red ball in the basket. All you, or your smart digital friend, can do is just pick one randomly and see if it is red. If you are lucky enough, the first ball you pick might be red. In the worst case, however, you will be successful at your last choice. So, classically you have to repeat the process on average at half times the number of balls. If you made a quantum friend rather than classical, however, your life would be smoother. You would be able to find and manage your stuff easily, no matter how messy you are. Quantum computers speed up such unsorted database searches quadratically. You can find, say your favorite socks, in a number of trials that is about the square root of the total number of your stuff. You may think that you don’t have that much stuff. But consider identifying a specific element in a considerably large pool of unsorted data. As the number of elements in the set increases, it quickly becomes intractable to find what exactly you are looking for. In that case the significance of quadratic boost cannot be denied.

Motivated by the above mentioned factorization and unsorted database search algorithms, the power of quantum computing has inspired great attention, since their invention, among many disciplines including physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and material scientists.

Quantum computer today

Despite promising developments in theory, progress in the physical realization of quantum circuits, algorithms, and communication systems have been extremely challenging to date. There are many approaches for quantum information processing. Major model physical systems include nuclear spins, ions, neutral atoms, solid state nanostructures, superconductors, and optical circuits. In optics, for example, the qubit can be represented by the polarization (i.e., direction of oscillation of electric field) state of a single photon. So that the instructions described by the algorithm could be implemented by manipulating the polarization states of single photons. Unfortunately, all the models for quantum computing have their own drawbacks besides their advantages.

Given the trends, nobody knows whether or not a sufficiently scalable (i.e., large enough to harvest its potential power) quantum computer would be available in the decades to come. Nonetheless, D-Wave Systems, Inc., The Quantum Computing Company, was eager enough to unveil the “world’s first commercially viable quantum computer” (see Figure 1, and Ref [4] for the story.). D-Waves’ 16-qubit quantum computer makes use of superconducting element niobium, which operates at an extremely low temperature. It can search for molecular structures that match a target molecule, create a complicated seating plan, and fill in Sudoku puzzles. Although the device is very slow compared to an inexpensive PC, D-Wave intends to develop a 1000-qubit quantum computer.* The goal is to scale the quantum computer to about 10 thousand qubits to solve the most challenging problems outright, which are simply intractable with classical computers. The researchers, however, are not very optimistic. Prof. Lloyd of Massachusetts of Institute of Technology, a pioneering scientist in superconducting approach for quantum computing that underlies the D-Wave’s quantum computer, says “It’s too good to be true.”

Once quantum computers of reasonable power are built, the world will be unimaginably exciting and perhaps scary too. When the first commercial computer, Universal Atomic Computer I (UNIVAC I) (see Figure 2), was shipped to the United States Air Force in 1952, nobody was indeed aware of what this fat guy would lead to in our social, economical, political, and psychological life. Its descendants, however, are now inevitable parts of our lives. They are helping us in many aspects of daily life. Controlling machines, sending electronic mail, scheduling our plane tickets, communicating with our best friends, playing games, making our payments are only some of them.

In this article we only sketched the quantum superposition principle as an important ingredient for quantum computation. This is certainly not the whole story. “Entanglement” [6], for example, is another complementary resource for quantum computing and communications, as well as quantum mechanics to test its foundations.

Contrary to its classical counterparts, the power of quantum computers indeed comes directly from our granted capability of tailoring and mimicking the amazing design hidden in the microscopic world of atoms, photons or other quantum particles. Quantum computers sooner or later will bring the most science-fiction into reality. They will play a significant role especially in the development of ultra-intelligent machines and robots superior to classical ones, and communication systems whose ultimate security is guarantied by the nature’s architecture which was lay down by God. Quantum computers will reveal to us the deepest secrets of our Creator embedded in our universe, which cannot be explored using conventional computers. That day, the future will only be lacked by our limited imagination.

Acknowledgment

This article was produced in MERGEOUS [7], an online article and project development service for authors and publishers dedicated to the advancement of technologies in the merging realm of science and religion.

Omer D. Ikramoglu is a freelance writer in optics and quantum physics.

References

1. RSA Laboratories, http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/

2. RSA Challenge Numbers, http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2093

3. A short introduction to quantum computation by A. Barenco, A.Ekert, A. Sanpera and C.Machiavello from La Recherche, November 1996. http://cam.qubit.org/articles/intros/comp.php

4. J. R. Minkel, “First “Commercial” Quantum Computer Solves Sudoku Puzzles”, Scientific American, Feb 13 (2007).

5. UNIVAC I, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_I

6. S. Candaroglu, “Quantum Entanglement: Illusion or Reality?” Fountain, Issue 61 (January-February 2008).

7. http://www.mergeous.com/

* At the time of writing D-Wave Systems had only 16-qubit quantum chip and they were intending to develop a 1000-qubit quantum computer by the end of 2008. Although they couldn’t meet their goal, they now have a design of a 128-qubit most powerful ever quantum chip which awaits the tests (see http://www.dwavesys.com for up to date information).

However, space and time are relative according to the theories of Special and General Relativity which were developed by Einstein. A time period which is two hours long with respect to an observer may be one and a half hours or three hours long with respect to another observer. Let us suppose that two events are happening in different places (say New York and Istanbul) but simultenously with respect to an observer who is in between. The same events, however, will not be simultenous with respect to an observer who is in motion. If the observer moves towards the event happening on his right, that is, he diverges from the one on his left, then he will perceive the one on his right as happening earlier than the one on his left. Contrariwise, if he moves towards his left, that is, diverges from his right, then he will perceive the one on his left as happening earlier than the one on his right. Distances in space are thus relative and varying with respect to observers’ positions.

Matter has a certain amount of influence over time and space according to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (which he described as the theory he most enjoyed). Proportional to its mass, an object may cause changes in the geometry of space or in the acceleration of time. The curvature of space, for instance, is infinite near a black hole, which is regarded as a highly dense substance. Time is, however, constant and does not accelerate. This theory, with such peculiar outcomes, is mathematically perfect and coincides with observations conducted until now. Whether the universe is finite or infinite depends on the density of the material it contains, according to this theory.

Einstein’s theories, though they seem flawless, cannot explain how the universe started all by itself. All laws of physics lose their validity at the time of the Big Bang (the explosion at the creation of the universe) and all the questions relevant to that moment and its precedents remain unanswered. How come the Big Explosion happened? How did it happen? What was there before the explosion? We need to rely on quantum physics in order to answer these questions or at least to deal with their paradoxes and be able to say something about the formation of the universe.

Newton’s clock model or the deterministic model (that everything is realized in strict accordance with certain rules) is still influential in Einstein’s theories, whereas quantum physics (which explains the activities of atomic and subatomic particles) is a more revolutionary approach to matter, actively engaging the observer in processes and tying events to probabilities. It seems that developing consistent theories about the beginning of the universe may only be achieved by using quantum physics, which might also have something to say about the macrocosm. However, the issue of how the theory of relativity and quantum physics can be reconciled is not yet solved. Here, it seems that the theory of multiple or parallel universes may be an alternative solution, and hence, many issues have been hitherto paradoxical and unsolvable are now being explained within a rational and logical frame of reference.

What are multiple universes?

In the Many Universes Interpretation (MUI) developed by physicists like Everett in the 1950s, the paradoxes caused by quantum physics in our modes of thinking are being eliminated and the issue of how the universe functions is being reviewed by an all-new approach. A parallel universe is a realm that carries features identical to those of ours and comprises space, time, matter, galaxies, stars and human beings all identical to those of ours. It can even be said that these two universes are sharing the very same space and that they are positioned to coexist. The substances in these parallel universes are interrelated according to the laws of quantum physics. That is, there are a great many universes like ours. You may, for instance, be taking a walk in a forest in a parallel universe while you are reading this article in this one.

Alternative histories can help us to understand parallel universes. How would the world have been shaped if the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II, who conquered Istanbul, had also succeeded in conquering Rome? Or, what would be happening now if Hitler had won World War II? Each of these probabilities has been realized in a parallel universe. Any world which is imaginably different and any history which is conceivably alternative is present and available somewhere out there. We can understand these multiple universes when we also consider our preferences. A person who chose to study medicine, for instance, would later become a medical doctor. If he or she had chosen biology, they might later have become a research scientist. Or, a man who chose to marry a woman merely due to her physical beauty but did not have a happy family life with her might have enjoyed a happy family life if he had married a pious woman who was his social equal and compatible with him. Thus, different universes, that is, differing probabilities become available according to our preferences.

Parallel universes are often a theme in science fiction novels and films. In the popular television serial Star Trek, for instance, during a routine beaming up process from a planet to their starship “Enterprise,” Captain Kirk and his crew suddenly and accidentally find themselves in an ionized gas cloud. They find themselves inside an “Enterprise” that is almost identical to but surprisingly different from their own Enterprise. But, interestingly, the Mr. Spock in the new “Enterprise,” is an extremely cruel person. In fact, all of the crew are cruel in this alternative starship. Meanwhile, the cruel Captain Kirk and his cruel crew have been beamed up to the other (good) “Enterprise” and these bad men have been imprisoned by the good Mr. Spock there. Both Mr. Spocks understand, after a short while, what the problem is. The Enterprise, due to an ionized gas storm, has been directed to a parallel universe in which an identical “Enterprise” and its identical crew exists. The duplication is almost perfect except that good is bad and vice versa. Had the ion storm not formed a space-time interconnection, the two (parallel) universes would have never become aware of one another. The good and bad versions of the parallel Captain Kirks have replaced each other; while the bad Captain Kirk is being held prisoner inside the good Enterprise, the good Captain Kirk has found himself inside the bad “Enterprise” and soon noticed that he can covertly correct some errors without being noticed and by acting as if he was one of the bad character.

In the television series The Twilight Zone a woman meets her (parallel) double while waiting at the bus stop. Her double has apparently left her own universe and entered this one. This double wants to replace her and succeeds in doing this. The genuine woman is meanwhile sectioned to a mental hospital.

In the story “August 2002, Night Meeting” from The Mars Chronicles, a terrestrial person named Thomas Gomez who has settled on the planet Mars happens to meet a parallel universe there. He hears an elderly man as he is about to depart after taking gasoline for his vehicle: “You may return to your world if you will not accept Mars as it is. Everything is different here: soil, air, canals, aborigines (though I have not yet seen any of them, but heard their voices) and watches. Even my watch functions peculiarly and even the time is different here.”

Thomas then meets a Martian with gold-color eyes being carried by a machine that looks like a preying mantis peculiarly painted in bluish-green colors and greets him. The Martian greets Thomas in his own language. But neither understands the other. The Martian approaches and touches him, but Thomas does not feel him. They somehow start speaking the same language. As they try to shake hands, each one’s hand passes through the other’s as if they did not have hands at all. They can see each other, but cannot touch each other. They realize that they are in intersecting parallel universes. Each can sense his own body, but sees the other one as a ghost. They try to understand why they cannot touch each other while their universes mutually counter-influence. But they cannot find the answer. As he looks at his environment, the Martian sees a beautiful city full of marvelous things, while Thomas sees only desolate, unpopulated, ancient urban ruins. He shouts at the Martian, “All of these canals are empty!” The Martian replies,”The canals are full of violet-colored flowers.” They finally understand that what they are experiencing is something related to time. However, they cannot discern who is in the past and who is in the future. Each of them thinks that his own world is the real one and the other one’s is a realm of fancy.

Such peculiar-sounding tales contain some reality in the light of new physics.

New Physics: How do we know multiple universes exist?

One of the best explanations of quantum physics is the “double slit” experiment. In this experiment, a coherent light source which is emitting particles (photons and electrons for instance) illuminates a thin plate with two parallel slits cut in it, and the light passing through the slits strikes a screen behind them. When both slits of the thin plate are open, an interference pattern of alternating bright and dark bands is observed on the screen. However, a periodic pattern does not result as the pattern that forms when one slit is blocked is directed over the pattern that forms when the other slit is blocked. Or, when a measuring is conducted in order to determine the slit through which a particle has passed, the particle is behaving as if it is certainly passing through one of the slits, but this is distorting the pattern.

We can deduce, from this experiment, that the tendency of the particle changes when either one or both slits are open. Quantum physics explains this peculiar incident as the mutually-influencing of the probability of particle’s passing through one slit with the probability of the same particle’s passing through the other slit. That is, the particle, though being a single one, is behaving as if it is passing through both slits. The only logical way of developing a reasonable postulate is to consider that the particle passes through one slit in one world (i.e., universe) and through the other one in another world. So, these are the parallel universes which we have been trying to explain since the beginning. When the particle hits the screen, these universes unite again and become a single universe.

Another striking example which discloses the existence of parallel universes is the “thought experience” known as “Schrödinger’s cat.” The Austrian physicist Schrödinger devised this clever thought experiment: A cat sits in a steel chamber with a flask that contains a poisonous substance. There is also a small amount of a radioactive substance with a 50 % probability of decaying and thereby triggering a mechanism which will smash the flask, release the poison and so kill the cat. On the other hand there is also the 50 % probability that the radioactive substance will not decay, the poison will not be released and the cat will not die. Now, according to quantum physics, the cat will be 50% dead and 50% alive, that is, there is a superposition of states (the cat is both dead and alive) until the sealed chamber is opened and the cat observed. Naturally, such a thing is against logic and incomprehensible. The multiple universes (multiverse) model, however, explains this complicated situation more easily by saying that the cat is alive in one universe and dead in another.

Black holes and cosmology

Black holes, which came to the attention of science because of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, are space-time structures that absorb everything including light. They form as a result of the collapse of stars which are three to four times bigger than the sun and which have fully consumed their energy. The structures of space and time become distorted due to the terrifying magnitude of a black hole’s gravity as it is approached. Some physicists argue that black holes are passages between parallel universes and we would find ourselves in another universe if we could pass through one.

Belief in the existence of such a great number of universes also sheds light on cosmology, the science dealing with the creation of the universe and its structure. Possibly the most vital of the subjects that cosmology rarely touches on is the fact that the structure and composition of the universe are so delicately devised that it enables living species and conscious creatures to exist and survive in it. Only a single one among the many possible universes has been selected and made inhabitable for living and conscious species. If the universe had had rather different characteristics, these species would not have been able to live in it. The gravitational energy in the universe, for instance, is almost identical with the expansion energy of the Big Bang, and very delicate balances are observable in the constants of the laws of physics. By thorough observation, we can deduce that everything has been devised and prepared for our existence.

The multiple universes (multiverse) theory asserts that all possible universes exist. According to this assertion, there are universes in which no conscious species exist. The reason why we perceive that everything has been devised in this way in our universe is because we believe that we cannot survive in another one which is not devised with the delicate balances that enable the survival of living species. In fact, all this reminds us that there may exist unseen realms and worlds different than ours. The existence of beings like angels and jinns which cannot be observed by worldly eyes and the fact that the believers are those who believe in the unseen are mentioned in the Holy Qur’an. The existence of people like Khidhr who lived in realms of life different than ours, various prophetic miracles, saintly powers and the true prophetic dreams (ru’ya-i sadiqah) that give true prophesies all inform us that there are other realms beyond the visible one. Thanks to the new physics, the life in the grave, the life in the realm of barzakh (the intermediary life between the mundane and eternal worlds), the dimensions of paradise and of hell and their levels which we cannot explain in concrete terms, the realms in which we will either be punished or rewarded at existential co-ordinates beyond our imagination all seem more easily comprehensible today.

In fact, the principles of faith such as fate, death, the hereafter, the resurrection and doomsday do not need support from the cold and positivistic viewpoints of the physics with which we are familiar today. However, the fact that the idea of parallel universes was initially used in science-fiction works and only later dealt with in quantum physics might lead us to an important conclusion: We are witnessing today that many events which we could hardly imagine in the past (for instance, saving audio-visual recordings in huge computers and later presenting them as witnesses) are becoming quite common and ordinarily achievable in the real world. Likewise, the possibility that all our deeds which we perform throughout our lifetime might be saved by recorders in unknown metaphysical universes has become more easily acceptable and comprehensible. Today’s imaginings might be the realities of one day in the future. Everything conceivable or inconceivable to us may be possible, for the One who created things is God, Who is Omnipotent and All-Knowing. Additionally, as He has informed us about all these phenomena in His Divine Revelation the Qur’an, of which even not a single word has been changed, we do not feel the least doubt. We shall experience how smoothly our souls transcend from this realm to another (as if passing from one room to another) when death knocks on our door one day. Certainly, we should never forget that the ease or difficulty of these experiences and the sights that we shall encounter in other realms will all depend on and be created out of our deeds in this mundane life. And, as we say “all praise and thanks be to God” in return for an apple that we eat here, we will witness, only when we face the reality, how this gratitude of ours will turn out to be a heavenly reward (a tree or a palace) in a different universe.

Salih Adem studied Biophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 2001 and philosophy at the University of Maryland at College Park until 2004. Adem is now freelance writer on physics and philosophy.

A new world

At the end of the nineteenth century the belief was widespread in the scientific world that everything had already been discovered and all that remained was detail. If we look at it from a physicist’s perspective Newtonian mechanics was only one aspect of the explanation of matter. With quantum mechanics at the beginning of the twentieth century our outlook expanded and the existence of other dimensions was unveiled. These developments were indicators that other dimensions could follow.

In 1927 Bohr (1885–1962), Heisenberg (1901 –1976) and Pauli (1900–1958) were looking for answers to questions like “What is an atom? How does it function? What does it resemble?” The philosophical explanations were fairly striking. Studies had shown that truth was not deterministic but statistical (based on probabilities) and that material truths were also based on the observer. In conclusion, quantum truths were colored by objectivity.

Rutherford’s (1871–1937) experiments showed that atoms were not hard and unbreakable but comprised mainly space with little particles roaming about. Quantum theory, on the other hand, showed that the atom was unlike the hard objects in traditional physics, and that matter, rather being comprised of concrete sub-particles, had dual properties (waves/particles). The particles that made up the atom are seen not as being entities with existence in their own right but as going from one form to another like a dance of energy.

The physical aspect of the universe is like the waves produced by TV broadcasts. Just as television broadcast waves may show an apple, a flower, birds or human images the energy waves in the universe similarly take the forms of apples, flowers, birds, humans and, indeed, sound.

On the topic of electrons and light Richard Philip Feynman (1918–1988) argues that the only thing we can say regarding the behavior of tiny things is that they behave differently. An atom acts in a manner which is quite different to what we have seen previously. For Feynman it needs imagination to understand how they behave.

Feynman asserts that not all the conclusions drawn in science are absolute; they are only results or hypotheses on what may happen in the future. For Feynman we cannot know what will happen because we have not carried out countless number of perfect tests.

The truth of oneness

The cosmos is a realm of geometrical rules and operating on the principles of physics in an orderly and organized manner. The small things possess the same properties of bigger things; the former ones are perhaps not more elegant nor are there more wisdom in their makeup than the latter ones; but they do not fall too far behind either. All existence is in a chain of creation from the twine to the quark, from thereon to atoms and molecules, and finally reaching the human. In every thing, every task, every organization there is a perfect ranking and unity from the smallest to the largest.

From the electrons that exist within one millionth of a millionth of a centimeter to galaxies with diameters of one hundred thousand light years everything in the universe is connected. As David Bohm says (1917–1992), Quantum mechanics has proven that things very different from one another are connected to each other without the cause and effect chain. Everything is connected to everything else. Scientists who read the book of the universe in the light of science arrive at the Qur’an’s greatest truth, in other words, the truth of Unity and the reflection of Oneness in the physical world.

In the early days, it was noticed that the four basic forces (electromagnetic force, gravity, nuclear and weak nuclear forces) formed the basis of the atom bringing about one force. This raised the thought that a simpler theory could be made to explain all events and the universe as a whole. “Implicate Order” was a step in this direction. This theory explained that the energy fields light, heat, electricity and magnetism, once considered to be separate entities, could now be seen as “different aspects” of the same thing. The forces and material factors that help all systems to function in a harmonious way were nothing more than a reflection and manifestation of the one absolute truth.

The aim of science

For Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) the true aim of science should be to find answers to the questions of who we are, where we came from and where we are going. John Eccles (1903–1997), who received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1964, thinks science in its current state can neither bring explanation to the wisdom of our existence nor can it offer answers to basic questions like “Who am I? Why am I here and why do I exist? What will happen to me after I die?” In a similar vein, Robert Jastow thinks that science will never unveil the secrets shrouding creation.

The 1980 winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, neurophysiologist Roger Sperry (1913–1994), in an interview in 1983 stated that science itself is in conflict with materialism. For him there is no explanation of why the science and religion should be conflict. He thinks such a conflict is a remnant of the conditioning produced by the materialist philosophy.

With materialism taking root in the scientific world, life became meaningless, everything seemed banal. In the twentieth century when developments that rocked the very foundation of materialistic philosophy started to change the picture of the universe, it became clearer that there was no differentiation between science and religion. The sciences became more apparent as a way of knowing God. We believe that these developments will carry on to the 21st century in an exceeding manner.

Osman Cakmak is a professor of chemistry at Gaziosmanpasa University, Tokat, Turkey.

References

• Feynman, Richard. The Character of Physical Law, The 1964 Messenger Lectures, MIT Press.
• Schrödinger, Erwin. What Is Life? Cambridge University Press, 1992.

The quantum description of the universe is very different than the classically observed one, or our perceptions in everyday life. This new way of looking at nature has many consequences, both philosophically and practically. The modern technological development of the second half of the last century may be a very good example of the consequences of the discovery of the quantum world. Now we have a bunch of gadgets from cellular phones to long-lasting batteries, from engineered drugs to space missions, from pocket size computers to nanotechnology, a wide range of end-products of the quantum world. Certainly, these will not be the only changes in our life; quantum sciences will eventually affect the way we look at life.

One of the most dramatic potential changes in thought may arise from the discovery of the quantum entanglement of particles. Quantum entanglement can be described as non-classical correlations of different parties. It is very different than the classical description and can be explained by using the following analogy. Imagine an author writes a book of one hundred pages which includes the most precious arts or explains very important facts about the universe depending on one’s point of view. To make it more interesting or more realistic, he distributes each page of the book to one of his servants and asks them to read and understand the rules written in the book. That is, each servant has access only to one page of the book. If we assume the information on the pages is classical, every servant has one hundredth of the total information written in the book and if we let them communicate with each other, they can in principle reconstruct the written information. However, the situation is very strange in the quantum world. If the information in the book is written using entanglement principle of the quantum world, then none of the servants has any definite idea about the partial information on his page. It is as if the pages are empty. All the information about the content of the book is written on correlations of the pages, not physically on each page. So, the servants can have no idea, if they only look at their pages.

Einstein vs. Bohr

To understand this strange feature of quantum entanglement we should review the historical development of the concept. One of the earliest objections came from Einstein, who was one of the developers of quantum theory. Although he explained the photoelectric effect by introducing the concept of quantization of light, he did not believe in some of its consequences. Mainly, he was not sure about the completeness of quantum theory because of its contradictions with common sense and the theory of relativity. The famous 1927 Solvey Con ference was a turning point for debates between Einstein and Niels Bohr, who was also one of the developers of quantum theory and the Copenhagen interpretations of the theory.

Einstein tried to show this incompleteness by proposing different Gedanken (thought) experiments. Each of these questions was answered rigorously by Bohr. However, Einstein was never convinced by Bohr about the completeness of the theory. The last one of these Gedanken experiments was one related to our concept, quantum entanglement. It is called the EPR paradox and takes its name from the authors of the famous paper “Can a quantum mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?” by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in 1935.

Mainly, the paper was about faster-than-light communication between physically separated objects, two particles. If two particles are generated from a source affected by the existence of a conservation law, like the conservation of energy, or linear or angular momentum, the conserved property is carried by the particles independent of their separation. If the conserved quantity is observed by measuring one of the particles, the other particle arranges itself according to the result of this measurement independent of the distance between particles. According to Bohr, this arrangement happens instantaneously at the time of measurement, which conflicts with Einstein’s theory of special relativity that says nothing can travel faster than light. Apparently, the knowledge of the result of the first measurement is carried somehow to the second particle. Bohr’s reply is now called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. He takes this property as a postulate of quantum mechanics by saying that the state of the particles includes all information about them. After this explanation Einstein never replied again.

If we look more closely at the proposed experiment, we can deduce that in reality information is not transferred faster than light because although the measurement result of the second particle is decided by the first measurement, this information is hidden for the second particle. The result of the second measurement makes sense only if the result of the first measurement reaches the second one. Otherwise, the second measurement can be described as a random outcome of possible results. Now it makes sense if we return to the book description. Here our book has only two pages. Each page is given to one servant. If they only look at their pages there is no information, which means that measurement results are random.

However, if the two servants work together and share their measurement results, then the initial information can be reconstructed.

Coins

Einstein’s point of view can be described in the following example. Imagine we have two coins with the usual heads and tails on different sides. Let us assume that there is a conservation law deduced from everyday experiments stating that if we flip these two coins we always have two opposite results; that is, if we get tails from the one that we measured, the other one is heads for sure and vice versa. In the real world, these coins can be identified as electrons, photons or atoms. Heads/tails corresponds to the spin components for electrons, polarization directions for photons or ground/excited states for atoms. Now, imagine these two coins are separated by a large distance.

Einstein says that as soon as separation occurs the result of flipping is decided but this result is hidden from us. One can measure or learn it by performing a measurement or looking at each coin. Moreover, looking at only one coin is enough to determine the measurement result of the other coin, since the results are correlated. Conjecturing that the side of the coin is determined at the time of measurement is against the causality principle of the theory of relativity which says that cause and effect cannot be simultaneous. However, I am of the opinion that reality is closer to what Bohr described. That is, the result of the measurement is decided at the measurement time not at the separation time. Before the measurement, each coin shows both heads and tails at the same time. The information, deduced at the point of measurement when one of the coins is measured, is transferred faster than light, in other words, at infinite speed.

The nature of each coin is also very strange before the measurement because it includes both sides at the same time with equal probabilities, but a classical coin has only one side at one time, either heads or tails. Here the classical coin means the flipped or measured coin. This property of the quantum world is called parallelism. As in the famous case of Schrödinger’s cat, sometimes two extreme situations can happen at the same time. Schrödinger’s cat is a very special cat which is dead and alive at the same time, like a quantum coin. However, when one measures such a cat, that is, observes the cat, its nature collapses to one of the known situations, either a dead cat or a live cat. This measuring process happens systematically due to interactions with its surroundings and is called decoherence.

Although the quantum world is very strange and different than the classical world, it encapsulates more reality than we experience in our everyday life. In the near future, we can expect that ways of looking at the world will be different than the present mechanical, deterministic, and materialistic view because of the unexpected outcomes of the quantum world. If you know how to look, you can already feel this change.

The human eye can identify colors within a 360-760 mm distance. The limits of a curved sight cover the yellow-green field. Every leaf and blade of grass reflects light in this field (540-560 mm), and the human eye can detect thus detect green more clearly than any other color. In other words, God, the All-Knowing, made our eyes see the peaceful and lively color green more easily than other colors, and He granted us the ability to distinct over fifty hues of green – more hues than any other color.

In addition to green, the human eye also perceives the color red, the color of of begonia and barberries, which are colored with antocyan. But there is a chlorophyll layer with its distinctive green under the red layer on top of the leaves. Only a human can see a begonia like this – for example, a bee sees it in black.

Biologists found out that greenblue seaweed, which is really spread all over the world, used to provide our planet with oxygen billions of years ago, contains not only “A”- type chlorophyll, but also other pigments. The human eye, however, is “determined” to see only the green seaweed component created in order to saturate the environment with vital oxygen.

Claiming that “mother nature” has executed such a complicated selection, for the sake of Charles Darwin’s principles, is impossible – it would be more realistic to expect a typewriter to write the encyclopedia Britannica by chance.

We must, however, concede a very important detail. Energy absorption of phototrophic organisms, which is dependant the Sun, is adaptively connected with continuously changing levels of solar radiation. As it is known, the latter comes into soil, which then nourishes plants by facilitating the absorption of energy in a selectively narrow diapason (400-900 to 400- 700 nm). It is impossible to modulate an optimal situation for a plant to be nourished through evolution. A blind evolution would not achieve that in a time span much more time than the multibillion age of our Universe. This leads to the conclusion that the Creator made the specific system of energy absorption in plants via rays projected to the Earth by the Sun.

Aside from the fact that green is created and chosen by God, one more detail deserves listing. Objectively a plant’s leaf and its pigment are connected with selective spectral energy absorption. Emanation with different quanta outside of this precise and narrow “adjustment” could have any influence – negative or positive. Pigment of another kind would not function to fulfill its purpose to be vivifying. Is not turning the ruthless solar radiation into a life-giving flow a manifestation of His wisdom and of the love He has for His creations?

In our everyday life, we engage in amateur garden work or we just admire trees and bushes in bloom. This wonderful event, this miracle, appears to us as something routine. Pigments are highly organized; they are “adjusted” to radiation, which means that their spectrums permit them to absorb radiation in the diapasons at their limit intensity. Moreover, a plant’s organism is always able to increase/decrease this intensity.

For sure, there is one more obvious thing – the issue of the maximum solar radiation is relative. The problem is that according to every scale of wave length, maximum radiation is registered at 578 nm., and at 1015 nm. It would be even more, 1804 nm, if read according to the quantum quantity scale.

From the point of view of basic quantum physics, the most prominent authority on understanding of the role of God in the act of creation, the green color of a leaf is understood to be connected with the features of the pigment itself, the most suitable for the function of absorption and transformation of ray energy.

Another issue is also very important – what determines the diapason of a ray’s energy is its FAR and its photosynthesis diapason accordingly. If we do not accept God as Creator, it is hard to imagine how nature, through all its stages of development led the only source of inner energy, the ATF molecule – through anaerobic, then aerobic breathing and ultimately to all the forms of photosynthesis. This molecule with the energy of its chemical compound in the living system of some 10 Kcal/mole remained in the green plant, but it was not only the breath that was the source of its creation.

I would like to share my observations of over fifty years. As the solar ray energy has become the most important source of energy for plants, simplifying a number of arguments, I can say that the plants are granted a mechanism able to form universal inner quanta divisible to ATF in energy as well as to a photosynthetically important compound named NADP.H (50 kcal/mole each). This is based on the features and spectrum of chlorophyll. The quanta are one of the strongest donors of “his majesty the electron!” Please tell me who will speak of blind evolution after considering these “coincidences”…

I would like to share my observations of over fifty years. As the solar ray energy has become the most important source of energy for plants, simplifying a number of arguments, I can say that the plants are granted a mechanism able to form universal inner quanta divisible to ATF in energy as well as to a photosynthetically important compound named NADP.H (50 kcal/mole each). This is based on the features and spectrum of chlorophyll. The quanta are one of the strongest donors of “his majesty the electron!” Please tell me who will speak of blind evolution after considering these “coincidences”…

“Let all the breathing praise the Lord!”

There is a simple conclusion that could be made from all the above. If such “portions,” or quanta, are formed from solar energy absorbed by plants, then means the primary products of the same type can be also formed. “The quality of light” is of no metabolic importance for the process of synthesis in the limits of ray energy. The Word of God, once spoken out, is realized in a determined way, far distant from Darwinian theory.

Long years of experiments, research, and consultations with colleagues from around the world persuaded this author to change his opinion from vulgar materialism to a deeper understanding. Properties in plants are not the result of “calculabilitive” photosynthesis “touched” by science; like all things, these properties are of a manifestation of His, just as are the lives of humans.

This is the irrational choice of my soul. Nonetheless, as it was admitted in the works on the general problems of science and historic knowledge by the Chief of Department of Civilization Problems at the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences by Prof. V.I. Sheremet -the real breakthrough can be reached with faith in God and exploring the undiscovered. So I offer a second conclusion devoid of materialist explanation. The pigment apparatus of a plant is a complicated chlorophyll-protein complex that functions jointly with its intended object. Who determined this program of compatibility? The plant – the main hero of this article – is given the ability to form a physiological quantum of 50 kcal by itself. Moreover, a high intensity green quantum from outside cannot be used by a separate chlorophyll- protein compound.

The conclusion is obvious and simple: a plant’s life cycle is realized only according to His will and in the regime determined by Him. “Monochromatic” sources of ray energy are not suitable, nor welcomed, by God for the full-fledged artificial raising of plants, but it can be of use for the photosynthesis regulation. So, hotbeds are useful and necessary. The generalized summary is as follows. The green color of leaves and, the blue of the cloudless sky, are not random, they are the work of intelligent design.

So let the green color – the color of plants, of nephrite, malachite, and beryl – beloved and honored both in the East and in the West. Let the mysterious “green ray” of a seaside sunset, let the green stripe of the rainbow, the bridge to Heaven for the righteous, remain the symbol of His Will, His Life, His Awakening of spring in the peace of the heart.

May peace be with all of you, dear readers!