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In previously unpublished letter, Einstein suggests that new physics discoveries might come from studying animals

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The letter, written to radar researcher Glyn Davys in 1949, was released by the latter’s wife.

The letter also proves Einstein met with Nobel laurate Karl von Frisch, who was a leading bee and animal sensory researcher.

In April 1949, von Frisch presented his research on how honeybees navigate more effectively using the polarization patterns of light scattered from the sky.

The day after Einstein attended von Frisch’s lecture, the two researchers shared a private meeting.

Although this meeting wasn’t formally documented, the recently discovered letter from Einstein provides insight into what they might have talked about.

“It is thinkable that the investigation of the behavior of migratory birds and carrier pigeons may someday lead to the understanding of some physical process which is not yet known,” Einstein wrote.

RMIT University, “Previously unknown letter reveals Einstein’s thinking on bees, birds and physics” at Phys.org (May 13, 2021)

Would Einstein count birds’ use of magnetic sensing for migration?

The paper is open access. ‘Einstein, von Frisch and the honeybee: a historical letter comes to light’, with Adrian Dyer, Andrew Greentree, Jair Garcia, Elinya Dyer, Scarlett Howard and Fredrich Barth, is published in the Journal of Comparative Physiology A (DOI: 10.1007/s00359-021-01490-6).

Comments
I don't know how much credit Einstein should be given for anticipating 'new physics' for understanding the migratory behavior of birds. The article comments that "One theory for the origin of magnetic sense in birds is the use of quantum randomness and entanglement. Both of these physics concepts were first proposed by Einstein." Yeah sure it is correct that Einstein, along with Podolsky and Rosen, (in the infamous 1935 EPR paper), developed the concept of entanglement, he did so in order to try to disprove quantum theory, and/or to try to prove that quantum theory was "incomplete. In fact Einstein went so far as to infamously deride quantum entanglement as being 'spooky action at a distance'. In fact, it took several decades to prove Einstein wrong and that 'spooky action at a distance' was real.
Einstein vs quantum mechanics, and why he'd be a convert today - 2014 Excerpt: Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen – known collectively as EPR – realised that quantum mechanics predicted entangled states, where the positions and the momenta for two particles are perfectly correlated, no matter how far apart the two particles are. That's what was important to Einstein, who believed there could be no immediate disturbance to the second particle, as a result of anything that was done to the first particle. He called this "no-spooky-action-at-a-distance". per physorg Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’ spotted in objects almost big enough to see By Gabriel Popkin - Apr. 25, 2018 Excerpt: Albert Einstein colorfully dismissed quantum entanglement—the ability of separated objects to share a condition or state—as “spooky action at a distance.” Over the past few decades, however, physicists have demonstrated the reality of spooky action over ever greater distances—even from Earth to a satellite in space. But the entangled particles have typically been tiny, which makes it easier to shield their delicate quantum states from the noisy world. Two research groups have now scaled up entanglement to engineered objects barely visible to the naked eye. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/einstein-s-spooky-action-distance-spotted-objects-almost-big-enough-see
Thus while Einstein may have anticipated that 'new physics' would be needed to explain the migratory behavior of birds, and while he may have helped develop the concept of quantum entanglement, it is also true that Einstein resisted the entire concept of entanglement that he had helped develop. So just how much credit Einstein can actually be given for anticipating quantum behavior in birds is very much an open question. In fact, I would argue that Schrodinger, in his book "What Is Life?", went much, much, further than Einstein ever did in clearly elucidating the fact that quantum principles would be needed to explain all of life in general, (and not just the quantum principles at play in the migratory behavior of birds).
WHAT IS LIFE? ERWIN SCHRODINGER - First published 1944 Pg. 28-29 TWO WAYS OF PRODUCING ORDERLINESS Excerpt: "The orderliness encountered in the unfolding of life springs from a different source. It appears that there are two different 'mechanisms' by which orderly events can be produced: the 'statistical mechanism' which produces order from disorder and the new one, producing order from order. To the unprejudiced mind the second principle appears to be much simpler, much more plausible. No (a) doubt it is. That is why physicists were so proud to have fallen in with the other one, the 'order-from-disorder' principle, which is actually followed in Nature and which alone conveys an understanding of the great line of natural events , in the first place of their irreversibility . But we cannot expect that the 'laws of physics' derived from it suffice straight away to explain the behaviour of living matter, whose most striking features are visibly based to a large extent on the 'order-from-order' principle. You would not expect two entirely different mechanisms to bring about the same type of law-you would not expect your latch-key, to open your neighbour's door as well. We must therefore not be discouraged by the difficulty of interpreting life by the ordinary laws of physics. For that is just what is to be expected from the knowledge we have gained of the structure of living matter. We must be prepared to find a new type of physical law prevailing in it. Or are we to term it a non-physical, not to say a super-physical, law? THE NEW PRINCIPLE IS NOT ALIEN TO PHYSICS No. I do not think that. For the new principle that is involved is a genuinely physical one: it is, in my opinion, nothing else than the principle of quantum theory over again.,,," http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf
As Jim Al-Khalili explains, “To paraphrase, (Erwin Schrödinger in his book “What Is Life”), he says at the molecular level living organisms have a certain order. A structure to them that’s very different from the random thermodynamic jostling of atoms and molecules in inanimate matter of the same complexity. In fact, living matter seems to behave in its order and its structure just like inanimate cooled down to near absolute zero. Where quantum effects play a very important role. There is something special about the structure, about the order, inside a living cell. So Schrodinger speculated that maybe quantum mechanics plays a role in life”.
Jim Al-Khalili, at the 2:30 minute mark of the following video states, ",, Physicists and Chemists have had a long time to try and get use to it (Quantum Mechanics). Biologists, on the other hand have got off lightly in my view. They are very happy with their balls and sticks models of molecules. The balls are the atoms. The sticks are the bonds between the atoms. And when they can't build them physically in the lab nowadays they have very powerful computers that will simulate a huge molecule.,, It doesn't really require much in the way of quantum mechanics in the way to explain it." At the 6:52 minute mark of the video, Jim Al-Khalili goes on to state: “To paraphrase, (Erwin Schrödinger in his book “What Is Life”), he says at the molecular level living organisms have a certain order. A structure to them that’s very different from the random thermodynamic jostling of atoms and molecules in inanimate matter of the same complexity. In fact, living matter seems to behave in its order and its structure just like inanimate cooled down to near absolute zero. Where quantum effects play a very important role. There is something special about the structure, about the order, inside a living cell. So Schrodinger speculated that maybe quantum mechanics plays a role in life”. Jim Al-Khalili – Quantum biology – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOzCkeTPR3Q
And indeed quantum principles have now been found to be ubiquitous within life. In the following paper entitled “Quantum criticality in a wide range of important biomolecules” it was found that “Most of the molecules taking part actively in biochemical processes are tuned exactly to the transition point and are critical conductors,” and the researchers further commented that “finding even one (biomolecule) that is in the quantum critical state by accident is mind-bogglingly small and, to all intents and purposes, impossible.,, of the order of 10^-50 of possible small biomolecules and even less for proteins,”,,,
Quantum criticality in a wide range of important biomolecules – Mar. 6, 2015 Excerpt: “Most of the molecules taking part actively in biochemical processes are tuned exactly to the transition point and are critical conductors,” they say. That’s a discovery that is as important as it is unexpected. “These findings suggest an entirely new and universal mechanism of conductance in biology very different from the one used in electrical circuits.” The permutations of possible energy levels of biomolecules is huge so the possibility of finding even one (biomolecule) that is in the quantum critical state by accident is mind-bogglingly small and, to all intents and purposes, impossible.,, of the order of 10^-50 of possible small biomolecules and even less for proteins,”,,, “what exactly is the advantage that criticality confers?” https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/the-origin-of-life-and-the-hidden-role-of-quantum-criticality-ca4707924552
And this follow up article stated that, "There is no obvious evolutionary reason why a protein should evolve toward a quantum-critical state, and there is no chance at all that the state could occur randomly.,,,"
Quantum Critical Proteins – Stuart Lindsay – Professor of Physics and Chemistry at Arizona State University – 2018 Excerpt: The difficulty with this proposal lies in its improbability. Only an infinitesimal density of random states exists near the critical point.,, Gábor Vattay et al. recently examined a number of proteins and conducting and insulating polymers.14 The distribution for the insulators and conductors were as expected, but the functional proteins all fell on the quantum-critical distribution. Such a result cannot be a consequence of chance.,,, WHAT OF quantum criticality? Vattay et al. carried out electronic structure calculations for the very large protein used in our work. They found that the distribution of energy-level spacings fell on exactly the quantum-critical distribution, implying that this protein is also quantum critical. There is no obvious evolutionary reason why a protein should evolve toward a quantum-critical state, and there is no chance at all that the state could occur randomly.,,, http://inference-review.com/article/quantum-critical-proteins Gábor Vattay et al., “Quantum Criticality at the Origin of Life,” Journal of Physics: Conference Series 626 (2015); Gábor Vattay, Stuart Kauffman, and Samuli Niiranen, “Quantum Biology on the Edge of Quantum Chaos,” PLOS One 9, no. 3 (2014)
What is so devastating to Darwinian presuppositions with the finding of pervasive quantum coherence and/or quantum entanglement within molecular biology, is that quantum coherence and/or quantum entanglement is a non-local, beyond space and time, effect that requires a beyond space and time cause in order to explain its existence. As the following paper entitled “Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory” stated, “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,”
Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory – 29 October 2012 Excerpt: “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,” http://www.quantumlah.org/highlight/121029_hidden_influences.php
Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, simply have no beyond space and time cause that they can appeal so as to be able to explain the non-local quantum coherence and/or entanglement that is now found to be ubiquitous within biology. Whereas Christians readily do have a beyond space and time cause that they can appeal to so as to explain quantum entanglement. As Colossians 1:17 states, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
Colossians 1:17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
It is also important to realize that quantum information is also conserved. As the following article states, In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed.
Quantum no-hiding theorem experimentally confirmed for first time - 2011 Excerpt: In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed. This concept stems from two fundamental theorems of quantum mechanics: the no-cloning theorem and the no-deleting theorem. A third and related theorem, called the no-hiding theorem, addresses information loss in the quantum world. According to the no-hiding theorem, if information is missing from one system (which may happen when the system interacts with the environment), then the information is simply residing somewhere else in the Universe; in other words, the missing information cannot be hidden in the correlations between a system and its environment. - per physorg
The implication of finding 'non-local', beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every important biomolecule in our bodies, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious. That pleasant implication, of course, being the fact that we now have very strong empirical evidence suggesting that we do indeed have an eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies. As Stuart Hameroff states in the following article, “the quantum information,,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it's possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
Leading Scientists Say Consciousness Cannot Die It Goes Back To The Universe - Oct. 19, 2017 - Spiritual Excerpt: “Let’s say the heart stops beating. The blood stops flowing. The microtubules lose their quantum state. But the quantum information, which is in the microtubules, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed. It just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large. If a patient is resuscitated, revived, this quantum information can go back into the microtubules and the patient says, “I had a near death experience. I saw a white light. I saw a tunnel. I saw my dead relatives.,,” Now if they’re not revived and the patient dies, then it's possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.” - Stuart Hameroff - Quantum Entangled Consciousness - Life After Death - video (5:00 minute mark) (of note, this video is no longer available for public viewing) https://radaronline.com/exclusives/2012/10/life-after-death-soul-science-morgan-freeman/
Thus in conclusion, I don't think Einstein can be given nearly as much credit for anticipating that quantum principles would be at play in migratory birds as the authors contend since Einstein infamously derided quantum entanglement as being 'spooky action at a distance'. Moreover, since Einstein had a problem with 'spooky action at a distance' then I hold that 'Quantum Vitalism' , (S, Hameroff; 1997), where quantum principles play a ubiquitous role in all of life, would have been a bridge way too far for Einstein to ever accept and/or to anticipate.
vitalism - definition the theory that the origin and phenomena of life are dependent on a force or principle distinct from purely chemical or physical forces.
Verse:
Mark 8:37 Is anything worth more than your soul?
bornagain77
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Old Al was way behind the curve on this. Electricity was first studied and understood in nerves and muscles. Magnetic navigation of pigeons was assumed but not fully understood in 1918, and probably earlier. From the WW1 Signal Corps manual on pigeoneering: "The ear appears to play an important part in the sense of direction. It includes three parts, the external ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear. At the top of the inner ear there are three semicircular canals which appear to be the nerve conductors of orientation. It is possible that their great sensitiveness enables the pigeon to perceive magnetic and atmospheric impressions, and to determine the direction of the loft, either at departure or during the flight, when on account of atmospheric disturbances the bird has temporarily lost its way. "polistra
May 14, 2021
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