Andrius Kulikauskas
Mystery and Discovery in Biology, Chemistry and Physics
How quantum is life?
I look forward to the answer. I hope that somebody can show, as I believe, that the Krebs cycle, the metabolic engine of every living cell, is in fact eightfold real Bott periodicity, which cycles through combinations of the three quantum symmetries - time reversal, charge conjugation and parity. Or perhaps there is some other concrete role that quantum phenomena play by which life is life.
As we wait for that answer, I am curious who else is curious what it means for life to be life, mystery to be mystery, discovery to be discovery? Can we work on this together? What, if anything, can we achieve? I hope for a research program of our subjective experience, what we can learn from studying our limits, which we become aware of, when we try to think and when we realize the very limited ways we can think.
I will share what I have learned about the ways we figure things out in biology, chemistry, physics and other subjects. As far as I can conclude from that, life is not necessarily quantum. But the mystery of life - how it hangs together - and the mystery of quantum - how physics may apply to its observer - are very much the same mystery. There is basically only one mystery, which is the mystery of the sixfold gap between what we know and what we don't know. This much I can argue. I can invite others to work together. We can clarify the nature of discovery and mystery. We can gain insight and apply it.
The method
Visualization
Paradox
Three minds
Ways of figuring things out