As lovers of science fiction and anime, the editorial team of FayerWayerlike a good part of our community of readers, we are familiar with concepts such as The Force, seen in the saga of Star Wars. Or Ki, which is a central element of Dragon Ball Z and Super.
But we never believed that a group of scientists would end up setting up a project with relative research rigor where they basically end up trying to verify a concept that essentially seems to describe those two elements.
Were Star Wars and Dragon Ball Z stories ahead of their time? The information that we will share with you today in the first instance could force us to ask ourselves the serious question of whether both concepts could now be considered pure and simple science.
But it is more important not to get ahead of ourselves and to evaluate this project in the most objective way possible, where the central idea does not sound so far-fetched, although its implications do make everything more complex:
Verify that in reality human consciousness would function as a quantum wave that connects with the rest of the universe.
Star Wars and Dragon Ball connect with scientific research thanks to human consciousness and its connection with its environment
Buckle up because this is dense and goes back to a debate that has been going on for too long among certain members of the scientific community.
Since time immemorial, the topic of the mind and consciousness, conceived as something almost ethereal, has been debated. Where there is no universally accepted scientific explanation about where it comes from or where it lives.
However, new research on the physics, anatomy and geometry of consciousness has begun to reveal its possible form that would lead to articulating a kind of architecture of consciousness?
A new research work has emerged, available at ACS Publicationswhich is based on a theory that Nobel Laureate Physics Roger Penrose and anesthetist Stuart Hameroff first proposed in the 1990s: the theory of Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR).
This approach, in general terms, states that consciousness is a quantum process facilitated by the microtubules of nerve cells in the brain. Both scientists actually went so far as to suggest that consciousness is a quantum wave that passes through these microtubules.
And that, like every quantum wave, it has properties such as superposition (the ability to be in many places at the same time) and entanglement (the possibility that two very distant particles are connected).
Taking as an axis to understand it the process of photosynthesis and the role of chlorophyll to store photon energy. It is therefore basically quantum biology.
And now new evidence suggests that such microtubules could be even better guardians of this quantum coherence than chlorophyll.
The recent project, led by physicist and oncology professor Jack Tuszynski, is based on an experiment performed on a computational model of a microtubule. Where his team simulated shining a light on one of these elements, to check if the transfer of light energy in the microtubular structure could continue to be coherent as it occurs in plant cells.
The idea was that if the light lasted long enough before being emitted, even a fraction of a second, then it was a testable sign of quantum coherence.
Tuszynski’s team simulated sending tryptophan fluorescence, or photons of ultraviolet light that are not visible to the human eye, into microtubules. Theoretically, in 22 independent experiments, tryptophan excitations created quantum reactions that lasted up to five nanoseconds.
This, as explained by colleagues from esquirewould be equivalent to thousands of times longer than what one would expect coherence to last in a microtubule.
For years this theory, which represented an explanation for the architecture of consciousness, has been debated and discarded.
But the recent experiment, in a way, proves that the human brain is not too hot or too humid for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.
It sounds like nonsense, but it is the closest we are today to proving that The Force and Ki exist.