William Bialek (Princeton): Developing Unifying Theories for Biology

[@trombone7]

On the one hand, through most of the video, he is explaining a tangled hierarchy of cause and effect. Tiny, sensitive feedback loops affected by environment, RNA, transcription factor and resulting expression. Eric Raymond, in The Art of Unix Programming would call that a non-orthogonal system. Something like steering a helicopter, where the controls crosstalk and pressing back on a yoke meant to lift the craft, causes it to also diagonally yaw, requiring use of the pedals. Whereas your car, at least seems more orthogonal. Driving faster doesn't change the speed of your turn signals or change the radio tuning. On the other hand, I see why biologists are seeking unifying theories since current measurability has improved so much that it is improving predictability. It must be frustrating to be able to predict so well without an explanatory theory.

[@stankoaksentijevic84]

A mind bending fact that something pretty deterministic like life is, in essence, based on randomness

[@voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang885]

molecular vibrations exhibit a super-radiant instability....results in macroscopic quantum coherence...required to account for quantum-limited measurements in sensory systems....in accord with experiments in the sensory receptors of the inner ear....hearing is a macroquantum phenomenon....Thus, the ear not only makes use of a novel mechanism to reduce thermal noise, it possesses a device as noiseless as the uncertainty principle allows, and in this way it makes quantum-limited measurements, in spite of thermal noise. It is the presence of this device, a quantum limited amplifier, which makes the perception of sound a macroscopic quantum phenomenon....In the quantum-limited regime the phase of the signal is translated into the phase of the amplifier wavefunction, as is clearly true in Josephson junction devices, for example....they must be coherent....phonon super-radiance provides a natural means of explaining the macroscopic quantum effects....a coherent oscillation amplitude....spontaneous "beating"... at a frequency close to its resonance... will be reflected as sound emitted by the ear....microscopic mechanisms in which quantum coherence lives for a time comparable to measurement time, on the order of one millisecond. It is this results which completes the evidence in favor of Schroedinger's view of life as a macroscopic quantum phenomenon. There is simply no way to understand the sub-angstrom displacements in the inner ear without postulating a molecular mechanism in which quantum coherence is manifest on macroscopic scales of time and distance. Quantum Effects in the Dynamics of Biological Systems, 1983, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, William Bialek (currently Princeton Professor)

[@deeplearningpartnership]

Nice talk.