Just before Christmas 1941 Luigi Fantappie, one of the major mathematicians of the last century, saw the possibility of interpreting a wide range of solutions (the anticipated potentials of the wave equations) which had been always rejected as impossible, but which explained a new category of phenomena, which Fantappie named syntropic, totally different from the entropic one of the mechanical, physical and chemical laws. This insight projected Fantappie in a new panorama, which radically changed the vision of science and of the Universe which he had inherited from his teachers and which had always been the strong and certain ground on which to base his scientific investigations. A change in the basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science since it states that there are as many forward-in-time causes as backward-in-time. Although Fantappie was one of the foremost mathematicians of the last century, a full professor at the age of 27 and had been invited by Robert Oppenheimer to become a member of the Institute of Advanced Study, his publications on the theory of syntropy were unavailable since 1991.
Just before Christmas 1941 Luigi Fantappie, one of the major mathematicians of the last century, saw the possibility of interpreting a wide range of solutions (the anticipated potentials of the wave equations) which had been always rejected as impossible, but which explained a new category of phenomena, which Fantappie named syntropic, totally different from the entropic one of the mechanical, physical and chemical laws. This insight projected Fantappie in a new panorama, which radically changed the vision of science and of the Universe which he had inherited from his teachers and which had always been the strong and certain ground on which to base his scientific investigations. A change in the basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science since it states that there are as many forward-in-time causes as backward-in-time. Although Fantappie was one of the foremost mathematicians of the last century, a full professor at the age of 27 and had been invited by Robert Oppenheimer to become a member of the Institute of Advanced Study, his publications on the theory of syntropy were unavailable since 1991.
In 1977 a Vital Needs Model which required an independent property, symmetrical to entropy, which is here named syntropy, was presented by the authors. According to this model syntropy could not be a product of the laws of the macroscopic world, as all the laws of the macrocosm are dependent on entropy. For this reason the authors searched evidences of the property of syntropy at other levels, finding, at the quantum mechanic level, equations that always yield a positive solution, retarded waves which move forward in time, and a negative solution, advanced waves which move backward in time. In 1941 the mathematician Luigi Fantappie demonstrated that advanced waves concentrate energy, produce differentiation and structures, and show qualities which are identical to those which can be observed in living systems. In this way, Fantappie arrived at the conclusion that living systems are a manifestation of causes originated in the future (retrocausality).
The turn of the XXth century witnessed a revolution in physics comparable to Isaac Newton’s discovery of the universal laws of mechanics and of gravitation three centuries earlier. The world required to be described in novel terms, as the immutable, deterministic view of our familiar universe had given way to a new world picture, one which featured chance, flux, and an incessant upsurge of waves of matter. Such a worldview was so radically new and counterintuitive that it gave rise to strong debates, to the effect that Albert Einstein himself tried to oppose it on the grounds that “God does not play dice”. In spite of the intense debates that accompanied its emergence, quantum mechanics quickly proved an incredibly efficacious new tool to understand and to predict a wide array of new phenomena. It was so successful that in no time it broke free from the environment of research labs to become part of daily life, making it possible, for example, to understand why some materials were conductors, while others were insulators. Along with it, came, too, the discovery of transistors, on which much of modern electronics rests. It also led to understand how novel materials known as superconductors allow the transport of electricity with no loss, thus paving the way for new developments in the fields of medical imagery or energy distribution. Other aspects of the quantum theory led to the development of atomic clocks of astounding accuracy, which would be wrong by no more than fifteen seconds, had they been set at the beginning of the universe. A hundred years later, at the turn of the XXIst century, Quantum mechanics has lost none of its astounding power. Contemporary research has undertaken the task of exploring its less immediately perceptible aspects. Groundbreaking developments have ensued, such as the teleportation of grains of light or the possibility, once predicted by the great physicist Richard Feynman, to build, one day, novel computers which, unlike the ones we are familiar with today, will be able to process innumerable numbers of operations in parallel. The Wright Colloquium will be for us the occasion to explore, in the company of five internationallyknown specialists in the field, some of the fascinating aspects of quantum mechanics. We will appraise how efficiently quantum physics can describe our world, and confront its limitation when it is faced with the infinitely small (in relation to recent experiments carried out at the CERN) as with the incommensurably large scale of sidereal spaces. We will appreciate the extent to which quantum physics already has impacted our everyday lives, and evoke the way in which novel fields such as quantum computers and quantum information will entail profound changes in the future. The quantum adventure has only just begun! Monday 15 November 2010 - 18h30 Jochen Mannhart Center for Electronic Correlations and Magnetism, University of Augsburg, Germany Quantum Physics on the Scale of Daily Life Tuesday 16 November 2010 - 18h30 Wolfgang Ketterle Nobel Laureate 2001 (Physics), Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, U.S.A. When freezing cold is not cold enough New forms of matter close to absolute zero temperature Wednesday 17 November 2010 - 18h30 David Gross Nobel Laureate 2004 (Physics), Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa-Barbara, U.S.A. Quantum Mechanics of the Very, Very Small and the Very, Very Large Thursday 18 November 2010 - 18h30 Alain Aspect CNRS senior scientist and Professor Institut d'Optique and Ecole Polytechnique Palaiseau, France. From Einstein’s intuition to quantum bits: a new quantum age? Vendredi 19 novembre 2010 - 18h30 Rainer Blatt Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Austrian Academy of Sciences and University of Innsbruck, Austria The Quantum Way of Doing Computations
An essential component of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics is Schrodinger’s wave equation. According to this interpretation, consciousness, through the exercise of observation, forces the wave function to collapse into a particle. Schrodinger’s wave equation is not relativistically invariant and when the relativistically invariant wave equation (Klein-Gordon’s equation) is taken into account, there is no collapse of the wave function and no justification for consciousness as a prerequisite to reality. Klein-Gordon’s wave equation depends on a square root and yields two solutions: retarded waves which move forwards in time and advanced waves which move backwards in time. Advanced waves were considered to be unacceptable since they contradict the law of causality, according to which causes always precede effects. However, while studying the mathematical properties of KleinGordon’s equation, the mathematician Luigi Fantappie noted that retarded waves are governed by the law of entropy (from Greek en=diverge, tropos=tendency), whereas advanced waves are governed by a law opposite to entropy which leads to concentration of energy, differentiation, complexity, order and growth of structures. Fantappie named this law syntropy (syn=converge, tropos=tendency) and noted that its properties coincide with the qualities of living systems, arriving in this way at the conclusion that life and consciousness are a consequence of advanced waves (Fantappie, 1942).
The findings of physics at the beginning of the last century have caused a revolutionary change in our commonly accepted view of the world. Because of their seemingly paradoxical features the philosophical consequences of the new insights, however, were never really adopted by the scientific community despite the quite apparent and far-reaching technical innovations they enabled. The new so-called „quantum“ physics revealed that the world at its foundation is no longer the familiar, tangible (thing-like) reality but rather a holistic immaterial „gestalt“: pure „interconnectedness“, inseparable „potentiality“. Its evolution in time does not follow from strictly determined laws but is only guided by certain inherent tendencies exhibited in terms of definite probabilities for possible material-energetic realizations. Generally these realizations recover the appearance of the familiar classical world as an objective reality with rigorous dynamic laws. In contrast to the old world view, where matter, consisting of discrete, constant building blocks, ranks first, and its various forms result secondarily from different law-determined arrangements of these building blocks, the situation in the modern view is turned around: Relationship or „gestalt“ or „information“ is now more fundamental and substance or matter/energy appears subsequently as an as-if phenomenon on the macroscopic level. The new world view sets limits to knowledge and the related science on principle. It proves to be very powerful because it establishes bridges between all disciplines and hitherto conflicting paradigms and descriptions. In particular in this more open framework the non-living and living phenomena (including the human species) no longer appear as basically different, but as two different structures of the same immaterial essence, relating respectively to static stable and static instable (highly sensitive), but dynamically stabilised (homeostatic) configurations. In such a „basically alive“ world biology and medicine, therefore, have to accept that logistically the immaterial, information-type (“spiritual“) software in the background becomes more important than the (physical) hardware being guided by it. The well-known difficulty of complementary medicine – and in particular of homeopathy with its impressive healing record – to explain its experience in the language of the old science, based on substances and a mechanistic dynamic, may thus be resolved within the more open and flexible framework of modern „science“, in which knowledge has a more open meaning (due to basic indeterminism) offering many more dimensions for healing to the devoted healer. The observation of a highly diversified filigree crystalline structure of (liquid) water, as demonstrated by recent studies, may represent a material/energetic print-out of the hidden information coded in the basic immaterial software.
When the Great War began in August, 1914, Erwin schrödinger at the age of twenty-seven was a Privatdozent at Vienna University, at the outset of a promising career in physics. He served throughout the war as a commissioned officer in the Austrian fortress artillery, first on the Italian front and later assigned to the imperial meteorology department in Vienna. On October 7,1915, his revered professor of theoretical physics, Fritz Hasenöhrl, was killed by a grenade in an Italian attack on Mount Plaut in the South Tirol. Early in 1918, schrödinger received word that he was being seriously considered for the position of Professor Extraordinarius [associate professor] in theoretical physics at the University of Czernowitz. ‘I made up my mind to lecture there on honest theoretical physics, first of all according to the pattern of the splendid lectures of my beloved teacher Fritz Hasenöhrl, fallen in the war, but besides to concern myself with philosophy, deeply immersed as I then was in the writings of Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Mach, Richard Semon, and Richard Avenarius. My good angel intervened, since soon Czernowitz no longer belonged to us. So nothing came of it. I had to stick to theoretical physics, and, to my astonishment, something occasionally emerged from it.’ Even on active duty, schrödinger found time to read deeply in philosophy, and indeed it was the only thing that kept him from despair during the long years of senseless killing and destruction. A serious interest in philosophy was not unusual among German and Austrian physicists, but with schrödinger at that time it was so important that he was even tempted to sacrifice scientific research to devote his life to philosophical study. Much later, in 1963, Max Born wrote: ‘I am convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g., about space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics). It has taught us new methods of thinking (complementarity), which are applicable far beyond physics.’ By his discovery of wave mechanics, Erwin schrödinger contributed in a major way to this revolutionary change in our view of the world [ Weltanschauunung ].
Chalmers divides the problems of consciousness into: The easy problem, which deals with the study of neurobiological models of consciousness. Considering the enormous progresses of science it is relatively simple to find neural correlates of the conscious experiences. The easy problems largely deals with the functioning of the brain in the way it transmits and reads sensory signals, in the processing of information, in the control of behaviour, in the mechanisms underlying intelligence and memory, in the capability of reproducing verbal accounts, etc. Nevertheless, according to Chalmers, this approach does not explain the subjective qualities that consciousness has for the subject; in other words this approach is not able to answer the problem of the phenomenal consciousness. The hard problem which deals with the explanation of the qualitative and subjective aspects of consciousness, which escape a physicalistic and materialistic analysis. In the first chapter of this work, models suggested by Antonio Damasio (1999), Gerald Edelman (2000) and Francisco Varela (1996) are described. These models try to explain consciousness using the principles of classical physics. These models show a different attitude towards localization: Damasio suggests neural sites in which consciousness could take place, Edelman suggests that consciousness is a global process of all the brain and Varela considers consciousness as a distributed quality of all the organism and of the interaction of the organism with the environment. In the second chapter, the models of consciousness based on quantum mechanics are reviewed. Using together the criteria of scientific falsification and the criteria of biological compatibility only two models, one suggested by Luigi Fantappiè (1942) and the other one suggested by Chris King (2003), survive the selection. It is interesting to note that these models are not pure quantum mechanical models, as they both originate from the integration of Schrödinger’s wave equation (quantum mechanics) with special relativity