The Seductive Allure of Cargo Cult Computationalism

Bruineberg and colleagues report a striking confusion, in which the formal Bayesian notion of a “Markov Blanket” has been frequently misunderstood and misapplied to phenomena of mind and life. I argue that misappropriation of formal concepts is pervasive in the “predictive processing” literature, and echo Richard Feynman in suggesting how we might resist the allure of cargo cult computationalism.

An Abiding Affection

This chapter provides a brief outline of Esther Zimmer’s early life. Born in 1922 to immigrant Jewish parents who had moved from Manhattan’s Lower East Side to the South Bronx, she demonstrated a talent for languages at an early age, learning biblical Hebrew from her grandfather and later distinguishing herself in Spanish and French. Despite her professors’ expectations that she become a foreign language teacher, Zimmer chose to become a scientist. Her love affair with microorganisms began in the mycology laboratory of the New York Botanical Gardens, her abiding affection for bacteria, especially E. coli K-12, memorialized in the beach house named Kappa Dodici, Italian for K-12. For Esther, this particular bacterial strain displayed the treasures of bacterial sex uncovered by her research. Esther cherished the joy of discovery far beyond academic tenure or recognition. Like renowned physicist Richard Feynman, her prime motivation for doing laboratory research was “the sheer pleasure of finding things out.”

Realization of quantum nanomagnets in metal-free porphyrins

Quantum nanomagnets exhibit collective quantum behaviors beyond the usual long range ordered states due to the interplay of low dimension, competing interactions and strong quantum fluctuations. Despite numerous theoretical works treating quantum magnetism, the experimental study of individual quantum nanomagnets remains very challenge, greatly hindering the development of this cutting-edge field. Here, we demonstrate an effective strategy to realize individual quantum nanomagnets in metal-free porphyrins by using combined on-surface synthesis and atom manipulation approaches, with the ultimate ability to arrange coupled spins one by one as envisioned by Richard Feynman 60 years ago. A series of metal-free porphyrin nanomagnets have been constructed on Au(111) and their collective magnetic properties have been thoroughly characterized on the atomic scale by scanning probe microscopy together with theoretical calculations. Our results reveal that the constructed S=1/2 antiferromagnets host a gapped excitation in consistent with isotropic Heisenberg antiferromagnets S=1/2 model, while the S=1 antiferromagnets with odd-number units exhibit two zero-mode end states due to quantum fluctuations. Our achieved strategy not only provides a unique testing bed to study the strongly correlated effects of quantum magnetism in purely organic materials, but expands the functionalities of porphyrins with implications for quantum technological applications.

Nanomanufacturing: There’s Still Plenty of Room at the Bottom

In 1959, Prof. Richard Feynman gave his famous lecture “There’s plenty of roomat the bottom”, which is considered the birth of the nanotechnology and nanoscience fields of research [...]

Introduction

The work begins with a look at the tabletop experiment Richard Feynman performed before a presidential commission investigating the space shuttle Challenger disaster. The case introduces the work’s leading questions—what do good experiments accomplish? What is the relation between experiments and experience, or between experience and knowledge? A distinction between two versions of empiricism plays a thematic role in the work. One version is “problematic,” another “theorematic,” using terms from Euclid for a difference in what these empiricisms expect from experience. For theorematic empiricism experience is ultimate evidence, its value probative (proof, demonstration, verification). Problematic empiricism eschews the idea of ultimate evidence, and from experience expects superior performance and a successful solution to a problem of knowledge. It is this problematic empiricism that is associated with scientific experimentation (the argument of Part I), as well as with the so-called radical empiricists (the argument of Part II).

Biomolecular Quantum Computation

In terms of leveraging the total power of quantum computing, the prevalent current (2020) model of designing quantum computation devices to follow the von Neuman model of abstraction is highly unlikely to be making full use of the full range of computational assistance possible at the atomic and molecular level. This is particularly the case for molecular modeling, in using computational models that more directly leverage the quantum effects of one set of molecules to estimate the behavior of some other set of molecules would remove the bottleneck of insisting that modeling first be converted to the virtual binary or digital format of quantum von Neuman machines. It is argued that even though this possibility of “fighting molecular quantum dynamics with molecular quantum dynamics” was recognized by early quantum computing founders such as Yuri Manin and Richard Feynman, the idea was quickly overlooked in favor of the more computer-compatible model that later developed into qubits and qubit processing.

Next Steps

Chapter 13 investigates cryptocurrency and quantum computing. Bitcoin – the world’s first cryptocurrency - was released by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. Unlike conventional money, Bitcoin transactions are anonymous - maintained by a worldwide collection of computers operated by volunteers. Bitcoin took off on the black market but then migrated to legitimate business. The current value of all bitcoins is a staggering $41 billion. Strangely, no one knows who Nakamoto is – he, she, or they have yet to reveal themselves. Quantum computing was first proposed by physicist Richard Feynman in 1981. His idea was that the weird behaviour of sub-atomic particles could be exploited to perform computations. In theory, quantum computing allows huge numbers of calculations to be performed simultaneously. Google, IBM and others are now in race to build a practical quantum computer. Such a machine might well crack the encryption algorithms that currently underpin both the Internet and Bitcoin.

Álvarez Díaz, J. A. (2018). Aspectos éticos de la nanotecnología en la atención de la salud. Ciudad de México: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. Bárbara Rubio

Ha pasado ya más de medio siglo desde que el premio nobel de Física Richard Feynman pronunciara en el Instituto de Tecnología de California su famoso discurso titulado “Hay mucho espacio en el fondo”, que fue considerado por muchos el origen de la nanotecnología (There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom, 1959), aunque este término como tal fuera acuñado por Taniguchi en 1974.

Editorial for the Special Issue on “Nanodevices for Microwave and Millimeter Wave Applications”

Initially inspired by the work of Richard Feynman in 1959 during his famous talk “There is plenty of room at the bottom”, nanoscience and nanotechnology have moved during the 2000s from laboratory developments to daily life applications [...]