Modeling the Quantum Nature of Life

A quantum mechanical model of life

I once noticed a midge in the toilet bowl sitting on the side and the poor chap got hit by the spatter and knocked into the brew whence he got flushed to oblivion and I thought aha, quantum spatter. What were the chances I thought and I put my statistics hat on.

I had a marvelous statistics professor at UBC when I took it some 30 years ago, Dr. Peter Larkin, a fisheries biologist deluxe, and he taught us to think in probabilistic terms. Well, I thought that my midge had given me a way to model the quantum nature of life.

Here is what I came up with. Imagine a marvelous bowl filled with enormous delights but with a whirlpool at the bottom which represents death. Then imagine that there is a waterfall going into that whirlpool which makes spray that is lethal if it hits you because it knocks you into the whirlpool. Then imagine that we are initiated into life on the top rim of the bowl and our job is to walk round and round the bowl ever descending to get to the bottom but only when we have lived our genetically programmed maximum. Each of us therefore chooses a trajectory that fits our genetic maximum. Those with short life programs get a steep trajectory and those with a long ones get a shallow trajectory.

Here is where the quantum nature kicks in. The closer we get to the bottom of the bowl, which I shall call bottomus, a name I once gave to a deadly sucking hole in a glacier which you can read about in my Mount Black Sister short story, the Goat Queen and the Catasoni Princess, the higher will be the spatter flux and the greater the likelihood of being spattered into Bottomus.

http://www.geocities.com/jormabio/archive/goat_queen_fable.html

The spatter flux represents random risk and the likelihood of being spattered is a function of shape of the bowl, and shape of the spatter flux distribution as a function of elevation, and where you are in the bowl. The path can also change if we adopt high risk life styles which causes us to skip ahead and move into a zone of higher spatter flux density. Very few make it to the bottom without being spattered and they are the so called lucky ones, thus there will be less and less travelers as one get close to Bottomus.

One thing is sure, nobody gets out of the bowl alive in the end. But this is no ordinary bowl, it is a beautiful blue everted marble in space.

What is so bizarre about our species is that there are actually nasty travelers who enjoy spattering other travelers so that they do not get to enjoy the long and beautiful journey to bottomus or even more strange, they spatter themselves.

The mathematics of this model is moderately well, but not perfectly fitted by markov type leslie matrix processes well articulated by demographers. It tracks survival and reproductive rate of age class cohorts rather than individuals which a good quantum model would do. I was the first to use it to fit eagle populations and you can see how it works at my web site below. I also devised computational methodology from the survivorship data to compute the maximum age ie trajectory for bald eagles. The big O' represents the integrand sign and the big e represents Sigma summation.

http://www.geocities.com/jormabio/archive/lifetableeagles79.html

http://www.geocities.com/jormabio/archive/jjcmeaglemaxage.html

What is needed is a physics or statistics or mathematics grad to do a Phd. thesis based on this probabilistic model and come up with a complete quantum mechanical description of terrestrial life processes. There may well be some deterministic overlap however, since genes, mutation, working with environment, location of birth, natural selection set and reset the trajectories and choices we make and those that are made for us determine our path. 

Natural selection, stochastic, working on genetic mutations, stochastic is the biological quantum mechanics that sets initial trajectory and thereby transforms to determinism by fixing the genome. Which genes are turned on is partly determined by environmental stimuli which have both stochastic and deterministic elements. Location of birth is stochastic and modifies initial trajectory but choice injects determinism again into trajectory. What is so clear from all of this is that we can modify risk because spatter flux varies between countries and between choices.

It suggests that something about countries needs corrections for improvements to occur and it is clear from my experience that those things that differ are ecological, political and religious systems. Some are good for you and others are not. Look at demographic data and life expectancy for your country and ask some hard questions. Is your religion or government actually good for you or do they add to the spatter? I can think of at least two countries in Africa where the government adds enormously to the spatter. 

Choices for optimization are in the areas of mates, friends, political representatives, advisors,  careers, hobbies, beliefs, locations, associates, ecosystems(overlaps locations), diets, safety focus. Ask only this when making a choice in life, does it increase spatter or cause you to skip ahead?

Can our population demography all be boiled down to this? We are no more than mere spatter dodging midges in the toilet bowl of life!

Jormawankenobe

© 2008 J. Jyrkkanen