The Experimenter and the Experiment

Francis Beauvais

Background: Benveniste’s biology experiments suggested the existence of molecular-like effects without molecules (“memory of water”). In this article, it is proposed that these disputed experiments could have been the consequence of a previously unnoticed and non-conventional experimenter effect. Methods: A probabilistic modelling is built in order to describe an elementary laboratory experiment. A biological system is modelled with two possible states (“resting” and “activated”) and exposed to two experimental conditions labelled “control” and “test”, but both biologically inactive. The modelling takes into account not only the biological system, but also the experimenters. In addition, an outsider standpoint is adopted to describe the experimental situation. Results: A classical approach suggests that, after experiment completion, the “control” and “test” labels of biologically-inactive conditions should be both associated with “resting” state (i.e. no significant relationship between labels and system states). However, if the fluctuations of the biological system are also considered, a quantum-like relationship emerges and connects labels and system states (analogous to a biological “effect” without molecules). Conclusions: No hypotheses about water properties or other exotic explanations are needed to describe Benveniste’s experiments, including their unusual features. This modelling could be extended to other experimental situations in biology, medicine and psychology.

Warit Asavanant, Akira Furusawa

In this appendix, we explain some of the basic experimental techniques used in the quantum optics experiment. This section is meant for the readers to grasp the image of the experimental development and demonstration of the optical quantum computer

J. Br, Lincoln D. Carr, B. P. Anderson +1 more

The experimental work on solitons in BECs during the past decade has been extremely important in two respects. First, experiments have shown unam-biguously that solitons and related nonlinear waves do exist in BECs. This was disputed at the time when the first experiments were performed in 1999 [1,2] and may still be found surprising given that we are dealing with a quan-tum many-body system driven towards strongly non-equilibrium dynamics. Second, the experiments have inspired theoretical work in many directions. A particular example is the work on solitary waves in dimensional crossovers induced by trapping potentials that restrict the geometry, as discussed in Chap. 7. A ubiquitous feature in all of the experimental realizations of solitons so far is the three-dimensional nature of experimental set-ups, which can never be completely neglected in the interpretation of the results obtained. In this respect almost all of the experimental work discussed in this book falls into the wider area of “multidimensional solitons. ” In order to avoid the duplication of discussions led in other chapters, we chose to narrow the scope of this chapter to discuss mainly solitary waves with a genuinely multidimensional structure. We therefore restrict the discussion to experimental studies of the creation and dynamics of vortex rings in experiments at JILA [3] and Harvard [4, 5]. In particular, we completely omit the vast body of experimental work on line vortices and the related baby-skyrmions, i.e., vortices with filled cores [6, 7]), as these will be covered in Part VI. We also completely omit the experiments on bright solitons, and the first planar dark soliton experiments [1,2] that were primarily concerned with soli-ton observation and propagation in BECs rather than dynamical instabilities and soliton decay. Detailed reviews of these experiments can be found in