ommunication channels ommunication channels Modems, brains, and atoms all have communication channels and all can form networks. It will here be shown that in principle, the organization of the brain and computer is similar to that of the atom in their basic I, II, III architecture.The modem: A communication channel has a source, coded message, transmission medium, destination, and decoded message. Computer modems send coded messages over phone lines to Servers or Providers (e.g., America On Line). These messages are sent via the medium of open space in the form of microwave transmissions to satellites thereby connecting to the Internet. They continue to a receiving Server or Provider, and through phone line to a destination computer-modem. There the original message is decoded i.e. reconstructed on the monitor. TV's work in the same manner sending optical and sound image as electrical impulses in the form of radio waves instead of wave functions used in atoms. The brain: In the brain, the message is sent from or received by the soma (central bulb containing the nucleus of neural cells in the nervous system). The soma has cylindrical input and output channels: dendrites and axons. Input is delivered by dendrites. Output is carried by axons (more in a minute). Both axon and dendrite, for simplicities sake, can be thought of as a pipe connected to two balls at either end repeated in countless sequences throughout the body and representing the nervous system: or a long potted tree laying supine with no branches but with pots (central bulbs) at either end and roots at either end being rooted into those pots. How does information travel: The following simplified, axons use positive and negative ions: positive sodium and negative chloride. Axons remain either at rest or transmit the soma's signals/impulses carrying our thoughts and feelings. At rest, the cylindrical axon has negative chloride ions inside and positive sodium ions outside its "porous" cylinder. The soma's output signal is transmitted by charge-reversals along the axon. That is to say, when the soma sends a signal, it passes along the axon like a wave. Signal passage is manifested as a charge-reversal: i.e. chloride inside the axon goes outside and sodium outside the axon goes inside: they only move vertically up and down, in and out of the axon. When the signal has passed, the ions exchange positions again like an undulating wave where like water – or sound waves in air – molecules just move up and down as the wave passes: they don't move forward though the force of the wave itself does. Neurons fire some 50 to 200 times per second which is the number of times each ion moves up and down: looking at a firing axon would be like looking at an ocean through a narrow, vertical slit where (slow motion – for visual purposes) an endless train of waves would be seen. Signals have wave lengths and there are between 50 and 200 waves per second. When the signal travelling through the axon reaches the last station (as it were) at the end of the line i.e. the synaptic knob, like a cannonball shot through a cannon, the message is shot or transmitted in the form of neurotransmitters through a small open space (as microwaves through the medium of space) called the synaptic cleft. The message is received by dendrites which carry the message to its soma where it is responded to (1) or not responded to (0). One neuron can have as many as 106 or 7 analog gates: can fire that many times in a single response to that many other neurons.1 Nerve impulses travel some 120 meters per second. Like a baton passed in a relay race, the somas together somehow both code and decode the "baton" of messages sent and received from and to sources and destinations in the form of reflexes, parasympathetic nervous system directives, sensory, thought or feeling-based information (like a pinprick on a finger) received from and to each neural cell to thereby simultaneously cause, regulate, and monitor our heartbeat, actions, sleeping, waking, thoughts, dreams, and conversations: all in 1's and 0's. We are less intelligent than ourselves: Including muscles, each moment of our lives there are thousands of different messages coursing through our body each second from regulation of heart, breathing, enzyme creation. We only have access to one thread of message creation and decoding: our thoughts – the thousands of other messages are known only to the deeper massive remainder of the brain we are strangers to. This decoded information makes the sounds and sights we hear and see and the soma's collective impulses transmits the sounds and sights we want to and do send. Our so-called intelligence is like the smoke from some fire: an infinitesimally small and infinitely less organized intellectual quality than the engineered system that enables it. The forces that made the single genome (click) from which emerged us with brain and wit complete is smarter than us. At the close of 1997 Antonio Damasio, of the University of Iowa, wrote:
Communication channels in the atom, brain, and modem Origination Communication medium Destination I. Transmission from Source II. Medium & communication channel III. Received at destination in form sent Modem Transmitter sends microwave communication Travels via empty space to satellite dish which send again through medium of space to receiver Travels over cables to be reconstructed as same communication sent Brain Soma sends message Sent over axon to synaptic knob where shot as neurotransmitter through a space called synaptic cleft Next received by dendrite and travels to next soma Atom Protons send W+ Travels via inter-nuclear space along wave function Received by neutron which somehow analyzes and recognizes W+ and emits W- Gregor Eichele, an embryologist in the Department of Chemistry at the Baylor College of Medicine says, "What perhaps the most intriguing question of all is whether the brain is powerful enough to solve the puzzle of its own creation."3 Not to mention whether it is powerful enough to solve every other mystery concerning the creation of the human, life, and the universe itself and why we like icecream and use, say, Cleopatra as a standard of beauty while spiders perfer a tasty insect and use some elusive standard of beauty judged, perhaps, by hairyness of legs or such. The atom: While a stand-alone computer's "brain" is within its case where all activity occurs, the atom has four types of cases, not just one: the electron shell, the nuclear shell, the individual shell of the nucleons, and while quarks within a nucleon are generalized, not indivdualized, they share gluons between themselves.When we retrieve a word to name a particular object, the mind does not let us glimpse directly the complex machinery that was put to work to come up with that word. We also have no sense of the relatively long lapse of time taken by the brain to perform the search and selection. 2In atoms, signals or messages are sent via "communication channels" within and between their "cases." The particle's messengers are: photon messenger particles between the nucleon and electron; both mesons, the weak messenger particle, and gluon messenger particle between the proton and neutron; and gluon messenger particle emissions from and to quarks within the proton (or neutron) causing emissions so that neutrality is maintained.4 For example, within the nucleus, nucleons exchange + and minus weak particles just as + and minus ions swap positions inside and outside axons as signals pass through the nervous system of vertebrates and invertebrates. What happens in the animal kingdom occurs in the atomic nucleus. In atoms, while there is no axon per se, the wire or circuit of the messenger particle is its wave function: there is little difference in principle between the way a microwave travels through wide open space to satellites using its wave function and messenger particles travelling through the wide-open spaces in atoms (atoms are mostly vast open spaces) though the distance and scale is smaller. In a simplified way, a W+ originates within the nucleus; it is output transmitted from the proton; it travels through intra-nuclear space like a neurotransmitter through the synaptic cleft; it travels to the receiving neutron which releases a W–. In this manner, each subatomic particle within the atom utilizes communication channels. Particles do not come out of others like rabbits out of a hat though. In the case of virtual particles, what is needed is assembled from the vacuum. In this sense, there is coding where information on what is needed is conveyed to the vacuum and decoding in the sense that bombarding particles do not become embedded in and a part of the body of, for instance, protons: their wave form (their signature) identifies them and they are responded to accordingly. Coding and decoding plays important roles in the brain and computer but is found first in simplistic form in the subatomic realm itself within the first second of the big bang. There are differences: The difference between a computer and the brain is that the computer is like a hard-wired brain where the circuits never change. Messages always travel the same circuits in computers: however, the same neurons do not always fire in the brain – that is the difference. The atom, behaves in a manner similar to the brain (or vice versa) in the sense that the actual circuits (messenger particle wave functions) are always changing. Schrödinger wrote of the cell: "In biology ... A single group of atoms existing only in one copy produces orderly events, marvellously tuned into each other and with the environment according to the most subtle laws."5 In that one cell which made us are innumberable atoms and molecules exchanging the information needed to make us laugh and smile when things are good and work to make us make them good when they are not. But, let us not look at the communication in a complex cell: let us look to the communication in a particle in H2O. Similarly, even in one small H2O molecule we have three such tuned-in atoms. There are millions of atoms in large proteins that are tuned-into each other via sophisticated communication channels broadcasting through the medium of inter-atomic space like microwave communication broadcasts through empty atmospheric space. Transmission from atom to atom is predominately through empty space. Atoms, then, are rather sophisticated pieces of electronic machinery in their organization performing deductions on, calculations on, and interacting intelligently with their environment. What a remarkable intelligence fashioned them. Atoms are sophisticated electronic entities. For example, quarks and electrons total together 806 particles in the uranium atom. They are like neurons in the brain in the sense that they are connected with other innumerable other partners (in this case, particles) via an infinite number of virtual messenger particles just as neurons can be connected to as many as 106 or 7 analog gates. Subatomic particles and their bigger structure, atoms, are kept in order by an infinite number of these particles (from the vacuum, coming into and going out of existence) in a quantum universe matrix. The workings of atomic communication channels resemble the workings of neurons in the brain except in some ways they are much more complex and orders faster. Lederman reminds that: "Every atom on the earth pulls on every atom in an apple ... and an electron's electric field exists everywhere in space." We have visual proof of a similar phenomena looking at stars cohering together held by gravity; watching a ball rolling down a hill; or waves in the ocean where every water molecule is by gravitation pulled by every atom in the moon.6 Schrödinger's categorization of the propagation of light waves as "concentric, spherical wave fronts like a system of onion shells,"7 shows the mind-boggling implications of all ever-expanding waves propagating as from pebble-made waves in a pond: but expanding three-dimensionally, mushrooming at the speed of light: like exploded fireworks in a summer night sky: or radials each extending outwards at the speed of light from the center of a ball of dandelion seeds. And this ballooning, spherical field must be continually mediated within by virtual particles with each quark and lepton in its sphere of influence. Thus, even through gravitation alone, virtual particle interactions – per second, per minute, hour, day, year, millennium, or million or billion years – with even one tiny proton is impossible to count and fathom. If we could photograph a uranium atom and blow it up to the size of the solar systeem and remove a three-dimensional section the size of a roadside billboard with virtual messenger particles large as grapes caught frozen in their tracks going to and from quarks and electrons, we'd see a picture that would be a facsimile of massive neuron-firing in the brain where in the brain neuro-transmitters shoot out of synaptic knobs into dendrites. In the case of the uranium atom, there would be trillions of particle outputs and inputs per second whereas in the brain there would only be billions of inputs and outputs per second. In this sense, on its scale, more units of information are sent, received, and responded to in an atom than the human brain. In the brain, nonetheless, each neuron is connected to innumerable others as are sub-atomic particles via their particles of communication connected to many trillions of other particles in the body, in the earth, the moon, the sun, the stars of the galaxy, the universe. In the above ways, particles of the quantum universe use communication channels sufficient to their own needs such that they maintain the thoughts, emotions, and life of each brilliant one of us. And, if in the next moment we lost one half of the tiny protons in our brains – protons taking up less than 1/10,000th the space of an atom – those qualities that we consider the territory of higher intelligence and human life would vanish and anguishing dementia or death would immediately set in. We come back to Schrödinger's implication, then, and ask what, therefore, is the contribution that those mundane, single atoms and subatomic particles bring to human faculties, behaviors, personalities, values, standards, ambitions, qualities, societies, cultures, feelings, emotions, and life? At the basic, they form communication patterns which seem to find homologous structures in the macro-world of the computer and the brain.
Atomic communication channels Communication medium: wave function Source <=> Destination Messenger Electrons <=> Nucleons Photons Protons <=> Neutrons Weak particles & gluons Quark <=> Quark Gluons
Bibliography supplied on request
[ Home ]