Quantum Mechanics according to Fatemeh

It is well known in quantum mechanics that from a pure vacuum state discrete points of pairwise existing particles-antiparticles can arise by shear fluctuations of the zero energy. But as measured on the macroscopic time scale, these particle pairs have a relatively short existence: only a few Nanoseconds. But who knows maybe in their own time scale these nanoseconds have the duration of an entire life. Whereas these particle-antiparticle pairs arise "out of the blue", seemingly from nowhere, when they disappear by anihilation they emit a defined amount of energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation.
These vacuum fluctuations of particles and energy are believed to be the reason for dark matter and dark energy, two essential components to hold together the inflating universe.

Because of their opposite charge and the very short distance between them, the particle-antiparticle pairs exert an intense interaction (best studied in the case of electron-positron pairs).

Mrs. Fatemeh now gave rise to the hypothesis that a pair of a man and woman can also arise from virtually nowhere, out of the blue, to develop a strong intellectual and emotional interaction, a force that suggests a very small distance between the two. In her blog Mrs Fatemeh cited a short poem by Emily Dickinson as the inspiration for her new model:

     I'm nobody! 

     Who are you?

     Are you nobody, too? 

     Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!

     They'd banish us, you know. 

     How dreary to be somebody! 

     How public, like a frog 

     To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog! 

What is unique in Mrs. Fatemehs model and distinguishes it from the well accepted vaccum fluctuations of quantum particles is that the small distance between the two partners (responsible for the strong exchange force between the two) is not related to the ordinary spatial distance (as measured in terms of nanometers or thousands of kilometers). The two interacting partners can be quite far apart, thousands of kilometers in our 3 dimensional world, in different countries or continents. But in a yet to be proven 4th dimension, lets call it the dream scale because it is usually hidden from us, the two can be extremely close together, like entangled particles. 

And she proposes, that when they disappear like the electron-positron pair in vaccum fluctuations disappeares, it is only a collapse of the 3 ordinary dimensions, but the 4th dimension remains intact and the two will always stay bound together.       

Books of the week: Crimea change sides

In 2010 I had the pleasure to visit Crimea, on the occasion of a genetics conference in Alushta. What a magical landscape, I thought, and I met Russians there and some Ukrainians and many Tartars. The Tartars invited me to a after-wedding brunch in their own restaurant at the beach, when the shops and cafes run by Russians or Ukrainians were clossed at this out-of-season time of late October. Later I visited Bakhchisaray, the old palace of the Crimean Khans. Aside of the muslim study rooms and the paradise and rose gardens and the turkish bath, Alexander Pushkin was commemorated there where a dripping spring inspired him for his poem "The Fountain of Bakchisaray".

Who could have imagine, that now, just three years later, another kind of books might become useful again to understand what is going on there at this beautiful peninsula, that was once the melting pot of Russian, Greek, Jewish, Tartar and other people. 

Japan - Between Shinto and Techno

The Systems Biology Hoax

I know I'm supposed to give a talk at this meeting, called something with Systems Biology, and I have only 16 hours left to sort out my slides. Sixteen hours is not so much time, if you are still jetlagged from the long flight to Japan, and you know the tiredness will come in 5 hours from now.

So what shall I do ?  I already gave a talk yesterday at another institute near Tokyo, but this was o.k., this was not about the Hoax "Systems Biology", but this was about something real biological, some molecular processes of stem-cell stability and long-term cancer risk. But tomorrow, everybody will talk about Systems Biology, and most of them have no clue what a System means, what modules are, what interactions or feedback means, and how this can only be understand with highly sophisticated mathematics: differential equations, topology, non-linear algebra and the like. But tomorrow a bunch of mediocre biologists are going to meet, to mask their limitted biology knowledge behind the Title:  Systems Biology. 

I just can not take them seriously.
The view out of my hotel room at the 14th floor is amazing:  An ocean of lights and illuminated bill-boards, despite the pledge by the Japanese gouvernment to reduce all unneccessary consumption of electricity after the 2011 Fukushima disaster ripped the country of a larger part of its nuclear energy supply. In daily life, you feel little committment to switch off electricity: At least every toilet seat in the country has an electric heater that is always on. Funny to see, that even the toilets could not be used if there is a black-out. In the Kimi-Ryokan in Tokyo, the service personal used to install huge hot-air blowers each time they change the blankets in the rooms.They explained me that the blankets are still wet, when they get them from the laundry, and by blowing hot air through the newly covered beds, they make sure the guest can sleep under a dry cover.
I forgot what this has to do with Systems Biology ? Only as much as at tomorrows conference some people from Fukushima will talk about the long term health consequences of the 2011 accident. Hot air, blown everywhere around.

The Golden Dust of the Sahara

Half a year ago I sold my old Toyota Corolla, which I drove for about 8 years, including long holiday trips to the Cote de Azur, Venize and the Dalmatian coast. But I also experienced a couple of accidents, one at night on the Autobahn when I fall asleep at 95 miles/hour and only woke up by the shouting of my family and the care crashing into the side rail. 

The most tender memories that I associated with the Toyota were multiple rides around Munich with Ghazal, a student who did her master project with me. Anyhow, last year I decided that a car should not be the subject of romantic emotions, and its declining technical state simply caused me more and more headache than could be compensated by any romantic memories. So when I finally decided to get rid of it, I remembered some guys from Africa here in Munich, who already approached me on a public car-park to express their interest in the Corolla. They told me it is a much sought after model, to be transferred to Africa where people like to use it as a taxi cab. So indeed, the guy was ready to pay me 500 € for it, even though I told him frankly that the air-conditioning was not working any more, but that the stand-alone gas-driven heating was still perfect. 

As a last farewell, before I handed the car over to a specialized over-sea export company for used cars, I wrote with a permanent marker behind the sun screen some "Greetings to Africa, Bone Voyage". Of course I never expected to receive any message back, and till yesterday I had almost forgotten about my old Toyota.

  But obviously, some message indeed came back. First I was a bit annoyed, when in the morning I found my new car completely covered with a layer of yellow dust. I suspected a nearby construction site to have polluted the road side and the cars parking along with their debris. And I also recognized a strange smell in the air, like laim or clay dust, and even a rough feeling in my troat.

Then I was worried why almost all cars that I saw in Munich and even vehicles from colleagues which  came from outside the city to work, they all showed the same pattern of dirt on the outer surfaces. But is was also obvious that the stuff was not spread up from dirty streets, but it had fallen down from the air, since it covered almost exclusively the roofs, windows and the engine covers.

 

The solution to this mystery was found by scientists working at the atmospheric observatory on the Zugspitze mountains in the nearby Alp mountains. They detected a jet stream from the far south, virtually from the African Sahara desert, loaded with masses of desert dust that blow North up to middle Europe and for some reason deposited most of the yellow dust over Bavaria.

Now I am wondering, that if mineral dust can be easily transported by the jet stream over thousands of kilometers, what else might be carried over here ?  Gold dust, diamonds, oriental spices, seeds of funny plants, bacteria or viruses for not so funny diseases ? 

But maybe it is simply the dust that the new owner of my Toyota somewhere in Nigeria brushed out of the cars chairs.

Inverse Snow-Man

In a recent article in The New Yorker the mathematician Gregory Buck wrote about his observations on geometric figures in the winter landscape. He discovered many instances of ideal platonic solids, in the form of a christmas three or in ice crystals. 

When he watched some snow-man on an empty field he was wondering, why two or three white spheres plus a hat and some pieces of wood which depict the eyes, nose and mouth, is sufficient to gives us the illusion of a typical human being. He argues that a real person, not an abstract portrait being is anything else than the assembly of three white spheres. 

But in my opinion, the writer of this essay may have watched the snowman simply from the wrong side, very much as one can see a vase or two faces in this famous drawing by Edgar Rubin. 

Gregory Buck's perception of the Snow Man is the assembly of three white spheres, one for the head, a middle one for the belly, and a lower one for .. hard to tell, maybe a shirt weared above an underground grid like Marilyn Monroe had it in "The Seven Year Itch", or a pair of oriental trousers used by the sultans and their servants ?   No, none of either. The key is to is to view the reciprocal image, not the three white spheres, but the empty spaces between them. 

Suddenly you understand what the typical Snowman symbolizes: An upright body (yes, perhaps a lady), with a thin neck and a slim waistline.  If you want to have the numbers: Snow Mans or Snow Womans Bust/waist/hip size could be well in the range of 36-27-38.   And thats the reason why SnowMan always look rather feminin, or like an oriental sultan.

Acid Jazz, Acid Rock, Acid Stem Cells

Organic health afficionados and alternative healing proponents of all "schools" have one thing they can all agree: an acidic body status is evil, and we should regularily neutralize our organism to gain eternal health, beauty, happiness and prosperity. Unfortunately, this might suddenly all require a complete reconsideration, now that Japanese stem-cell researchers from the highly reputated RIKEN center found out that an acidic treatment can rejuvenate aging cells into pluripotent stem cells. If this can be reproduced in independent studies and in human tissue, it will revolutionarize cell-based therapy for virtually everybody. The dream to replace aging or degenerated organs and tissues with individually designed spare-parts (made out of patients own stem-cells) could soon become reality. In their original paper in NATURE the RIKEN group concluded that "This study has revealed that somatic cells latently possess a surprising plasticity. This dynamic plasticity—the ability to become pluripotent cells—emerges when cells are transiently exposed to strong stimuli that they would not normally experience in their living environments." In an OpEd for the BBC, Chris Mason, professor of regenerative medicine at UCL london said "If this works in people as well as it does in mice, it looks faster, cheaper and possibly safer than other cell reprogramming technologies - personalised reprogrammed cell therapies may now be viable."

I am now asking myself if I should try right away a whole body shower in vinegar or ascorbic acid, to induce as many as possible stem cells in my body right away, or better wait for the first animal experiments which show acid related rejunevation ?  At a first step, at least I will stop following this anti-acidity diet recommendations by the organic food and alternative medicine groups. And I will drink a sour Martini and listen to some Acid Jazz tonight. 

Morning Triatlon

This morning I did an unplaned triatlon to come to work. The first ten kilometers I used my bike as every morning. And then the tyre went flat, so I had to leave it next to a bakery shop at English garden, from where I took a bus. After 10 min drive the bus had a collision with a car on a slippery road , so I had to leave and do the remaining 6 kilometers to my institute walking. I arrived a bit late, but as we say "fresh as a cucumber". Maybe I'll do this more regular in the future.

Leaving the Planet

Dear Michael,

This week the organisation "Mars One" announced that their call for applications to join the first manned mission to Mars was very succesful: Out of about 200.000 participants 1058 were shortlisted, for a final crew of 24 earthlings to build a new home for mankind on the red planet. The planed day 0 of this new civilisation on Mars should be in 2025 (1st of January, I guess for the Westerns, or March 21 for us Zoroastrians). 

So the few seats on the spaceship are 8000 fold overbooked, what is amazing, I think, considering all the risks associated with such a cruise. In fact, I think the mission is more a crusade (with little chance to return home) than a cruise, were a traveller would make a lot of photographs to show them latter to the people at home. Most likely, they will never ever meet their friends and relatives back on earth any more, since the Mars One mission has no planned return function. 

When you investigated the different options for an extra-terrestrial habitable planet, there were talks about water and a breezable atmosphere, green grass for the horses, but as you can see on the above picture of the mars, our nearest neighbor planet looks more like a desert. When you asked me to join you to Gliese 581g, I had in mind the pictures of Eleanor Arroway from the movie Contact, seeing her walk along the most beautiful ocean beach after being send to Vega using a relativistic space-time capsula.

I also like calm places to relax, like the heritable planet you were considering recently, or the planet in the system Vega where Elly Arroway went to. But a three years journey with 24 other space tourists, slandering day-in day-out, some of them already anouncing they want to travel naked, and or giggling teenagers - I can not imagine that this will be a joyful ride. I also checked the list of items which are permitted to take on this three yeras mission, and the items which are forbidden, and here it becomes really awful: You can take with you toothbrush, some chocolate bars (most likely Mars, but not Hanuta which I like so much), 5 containers sun-blocker cream (protection factor 200), 2 T-shirts, one pair of addidas shoes, and a WiFi-capable smart-phone. In total, personal luggage should not exceed 12 kg, i.e. you can not take a piano with you (maybe an accustic guitar), the horses also have to stay at home. The Mars One travelers have to leave behind their terrestrial existence like pilgrims do, and take on this journey not more than what fits into a city-bag. You perhaps remember the red suitcase (19.5kg they weighted it at airport check-in) I had with me when I arrived in Munich for the master project, and then I already had the feeling of missing too much of my stuff, even though it was only for a 4 month period. %nbsp;

Even if I would got used to all these limitations and inconveniences of the Mars One mission, there are also uncertainties about real health hazards. Recently you raised the issue of a potential plutonium-contamination of the Mars surface by the discovery vehicle, but what might be more serious is the unavoidable exposure of all space-passengers to the high-energy cosmic radiation, which during a 3 years journey would accumulate to several Gy whole-body radiation. Isn't that a life-threatening dose ? Even if the 24 passengers can avoid or cure any detrimental health effects to themself (by eating anti-oxidant containing functional food), the idea that they could ever ghive birth to normal children to buildt up an entire, healthy civilization is out of sight.

I never planed to become a funder of an entire new civilization, but I want to have at least one or two healthy kids. And I also want to have a lavish life with many shoes and clothes and a piano and horses and more cosmetics than only factor 100 sun blocker cream. I am therefore happy to stay on earth. It does not has to be Sweden, but there are quite many place on our planet which resemble Eleanor Arroways Vega beach.

best regards

/ghazal

Full Moon in White Satin

Tonight the full moon was illuminating our garden with its white satin light. In my phantasies, I told Ahlam that her face is like moon light, but I only wrote her greetings to Oslo and best wishes for the recovery of her lost suit-case.