Democratic Underground Latest Greatest Lobby Journals Search Options Help Login
Google

Honeybees are found to interact with Quantum fields

Printer-friendly format Printer-friendly format
Printer-friendly format Email this thread to a friend
Printer-friendly format Bookmark this thread
This topic is archived.
Home » Discuss » General Discussion Donate to DU
 
The Straight Story Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-27-10 01:22 PM
Original message
Honeybees are found to interact with Quantum fields
Honeybees are found to interact with Quantum fields

How could bees of little brain come up with anything as complex as a dance language? The answer could lie not in biology but in six-dimensional math and the bizarre world of quantum mechanics.

Honeybees don't have much in the way of brains. Their inch-long bodies hold at most a few million neurons. Yet with such meager mental machinery honeybees sustain one of the most intricate and explicit languages in the animal kingdom. In the darkness of the hive, bees manage to communicate the precise direction and distance of a newfound food source, and they do it all in the choreography of a dance. Scientists have known of the bee's dance language for more than 70 years, and they have assembled a remarkably complete dictionary of its terms, but one fundamental question has stubbornly remained unanswered: How do they do it? How do these simple animals encode so much detailed information in such a varied language? Honeybees may not have much brain, by they do have a secret.

This secret has vexed Barbara Shipman, a mathematician at the University of Rochester, ever since she was a child. "I grew up thinking about bees," she says. "My dad worked for the Department of Agriculture as a bee researcher. My brothers and I would stop at his office, and sometimes he would how show us the bees. I remember my father telling me about the honeybee's dance when I was about nine years old. And in high school I wrote a paper on the medicinal benefits of honey." Her father kept his books on honeybees on a shelf in her room. "I'm not sure why," she says. "It may have just been a convenient space. I remember looking at a lot of these books, especially the one by Karl von Frisch."

Von Frisch's Dance Language and Orientation of Bees was some four decades in the making. By the time his papers on the bee dance were collected and published in 1965, there was scarcely an entomologist in the world who hadn't been both intrigued and frustrated by his findings. Intrigued because the phenomenon Von Frisch described was so startlingly complex; frustrated because no one had a clue as to how bees managed the trick. Von Frisch had watched bees dancing on the vertical face of the honeycomb, analyzed the choreographic syntax, and articulated a vocabulary. When a bee finds a source of food, he realized, it returns to the hive and communicates the distance and direction of the food to the other worker bees, called recruits. On the honeycomb which Von Frisch referred to as the dance floor, the bee performs a "waggle dance," which in outline looks something like a coffee bean--two rounded arcs bisected by a central line. The bee starts by making a short straight run, waggling side to side and buzzing as it goes. Then it turns left (or right) and walks in a semicircle back to the starting point. The bee then repeats the short run down the middle, makes a semicircle to the opposite side, and returns once again to the starting point.


http://www.neuroquantology.com/repository/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=65:honeybees-are-found-to-interact-with-quantum-fields&catid=59:quantum-field-theory-in-brain&Itemid=70


Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
SpiralHawk Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-27-10 01:23 PM
Response to Original message
1. Queen of the Sun
Edited on Mon Dec-27-10 01:27 PM by SpiralHawk
"From the director of 'The Real Dirt on Farmer John' comes a profound, alternative look at the tragic global bee crisis. Juxtaposing the catastrophic disappearance of bees with the mysterious world of the beehive, Queen of the Sun weaves an unusual and dramatic story of the heart-felt struggles of beekeepers, scientists and philosophers from around the world.

"Featuring Michael Pollan, Gunther Hauk and Vandana Shiva, Queen of the Sun reveals both the problems and the solutions in renewing a culture in balance with nature."

http://www.queenofthesun.com/
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
struggle4progress Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-27-10 01:54 PM
Response to Original message
2. This must be a really old article because Shipman has been at
the University of Texas at Arlington since 1998

See:
Quantum Honeybees
How could bees of little brain come up with anything as complex as a dance language? The answer could lie not in biology but in six-dimensional math and the bizarre world of quantum mechanics.
by Adam Frank
From the November 1997 issue; published online November 1, 1997
http://discovermagazine.com/1997/nov/quantumhoneybees1263
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
SpiralHawk Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-27-10 01:54 PM
Response to Original message
3. Quantum applause for posting this, TTS
Edited on Mon Dec-27-10 01:56 PM by SpiralHawk
It is really quite remarkable, and merits a BEE STING into awareness before sinking into oblivion.

Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
bettyellen Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-27-10 02:17 PM
Response to Original message
4. but some humans don;t even see the need for algebra. HA.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
Xicano Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-27-10 02:22 PM
Response to Original message
5. Humans are also found to interact with Quantum fields. Its called LSD, DMT, Psilocybin.
I'm just saying....

:evilgrin:
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
nashville_brook Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-27-10 02:45 PM
Response to Reply #5
7. ah, good times...
how i miss my quantum interactions.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
Xicano Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-27-10 02:59 PM
Response to Reply #7
9. Right On! nashville_brook.. :)
Good times indeed.

:hippie:
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
hootinholler Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-27-10 02:41 PM
Response to Original message
6. Bad headline, interesting article.
Thanks!

-Hoot
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
tinrobot Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-27-10 02:50 PM
Response to Original message
8. It's an interesting correlation, but not proof.
Just because the honeybee dance can be explained using the same math used in quantum theory does not mean that the two are connected.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
qazplm Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-27-10 03:02 PM
Response to Original message
10. it's a hypothesis
the bees haven't yet been found to interact with quantum fields.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
DU AdBot (1000+ posts) Click to send private message to this author Click to view 
this author's profile Click to add 
this author to your buddy list Click to add 
this author to your Ignore list Fri Apr 19th 2024, 09:48 PM
Response to Original message
Advertisements [?]
 Top

Home » Discuss » General Discussion Donate to DU

Powered by DCForum+ Version 1.1 Copyright 1997-2002 DCScripts.com
Software has been extensively modified by the DU administrators


Important Notices: By participating on this discussion board, visitors agree to abide by the rules outlined on our Rules page. Messages posted on the Democratic Underground Discussion Forums are the opinions of the individuals who post them, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Democratic Underground, LLC.

Home  |  Discussion Forums  |  Journals |  Store  |  Donate

About DU  |  Contact Us  |  Privacy Policy

Got a message for Democratic Underground? Click here to send us a message.

© 2001 - 2011 Democratic Underground, LLC