Camouflaged Contextual Posturing in the Laws of Nature: Hidden Riches for Novel Forms of Technology and Energy Generation

Scientific Paper
Title	Camouflaged Contextual Posturing in the Laws of Nature: Hidden Riches for Novel Forms of Technology and Energy Generation
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Donald Reed
Keywords	Chameleon Energy, Contextual Cosmos, Bose-Einstein condensate, atomtronics
Published	2011
Journal	Proceedings of the NPA
Volume	8
No. of pages	10
Pages	464-473

Read the full paper here

Abstract

Evidence will be presented from a wide spectrum of recent empirical and theoretical research to advance the thesis that the laws of nature, particularly in the astrophysical and microphysical arenas, are in some sense contextual, possibly dependent on both location and to a certain extent direction. The most compelling evidence to date to support this hypothesis will be brought forth – the surprising 2010 finding that the value of the fine structure constant appears slightly smaller than it was eons ago, if one looks in the northern sky direction, and incrementally higher if one scans the southern sky. This and the "chameleon" principle, which has been advanced to explain the anomalous acceleration of cosmic expansion, will also be shown to call into question one of the sacrosanct foundational tenets of general relativity, the Equivalence Principle. In the microphysical realm, it will be shown that the principles underlying quantum mechanics, especially superposition and counter-intuitive nature of entanglement, might naturally exhibit contextual qualities that have yet to be recognized and fully probed. In particular, it is argued that further progress in achieving mastery over the precise flexible manipulation of Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) states could demonstrate that quantum contextuality might be an over-arching archetypal principle in nature, leading to new insight in regards to the interpretation of quantum mechanics as applied to all levels of nature Finally, it is demonstrated that this considerably fairly well hidden contextual aspect of natural laws, might be brought to bear to account for physical anomalies heretofore inexplicable using current paradigms, such as the claimed efficacy of homeopathic protocols. Moreover, acknowledgment of this novel principle of contextual posturing of natural laws even in the macroscopic regime might imply unplumbed prospects for development of new energy sources and forms of energy generation.

Overview

This is a review essay rather than a derivation: Reed advances no equations and no new calculation, but assembles about thirty recent experimental and theoretical results from astrophysics, quantum optics, quantum information, biophysics and the fringe literature under a single proposed organising idea. That idea is contextuality — the claim that "far from being independent of local conditions associated with space and time, in many respects the laws of nature might actually, at the primordial levels of reality – beyond space and time – be contextually postured", so that "physically measurable properties of material bodies, and the customary yardsticks of nature, could ultimately be malleable and only be properly defined in terms of interactions with other bodies in their environment."

Reed opens by listing the axioms he intends to challenge: that physical laws are true, universal, absolute, unchanged over time and "omnipotent". Against these he sets Webb's reported spatial dipole in the fine structure constant, the chameleon-field model of dark energy, state-independent quantum contextuality experiments, quantum coherence in photosynthesis, Bose–Einstein condensate optics and atomtronics, and — in the paper's most exposed section — a defence of homeopathy via water structure. The concluding claim is programmatic: if contextuality is real then low-energy nuclear reactions might be made reproducible, artificial light-harvesting might be engineered, and technology "capable of 'tuning' masses at the macroscopic level" might render "rocket technology for space travel obsolete."

The survey

Quantum contextuality

Reed's technical anchor is the Kochen–Specker style result that the outcome of a quantum measurement can depend on which other compatible measurements are made alongside it. He reports Kirchmair and colleagues' 2009 trapped-ion experiment as showing "that quantum mechanics conflicts with non-contextuality regardless of the quantum state of the system" — a state-independent result, stronger than Bell's inequality tests, which "require the preparation of a very specific quantum state called the entangled state". Ten states were tested, and all violated the inequality. Photon (Huang et al. 2003) and neutron (Bartosik et al. 2009) tests are cited alongside.

He then extends the point to the macroscopic domain via the Leggett–Garg inequality — "Bell's inequality in time", proposed in 1985 for the flux of a superconducting ring — and Palacios-Laloy and colleagues' realisation using a 5 GHz transmon under continuous weak measurement, which violated it, so that "the behavior of even a 'macroscopic object' clearly follows the laws of quantum mechanics."

Quantum biology

Engel's 2007 ultrafast two-dimensional spectroscopy of the light-harvesting complex of green anoxygenic bacteria at 77 K is reported as showing "long-lived wavelike quantum beating coherence", with intercromophore separations of ~15 Å giving strong dipole coupling. Reed adopts the popular gloss that coherence "enables the system to simultaneously sample all the energy pathways and choose the most efficient one", contradicting the classical hopping picture. Collini and colleagues' 2010 work on cryptophyte algae is presented as the stronger result — coherence lasting over 400 fs, longer than the 100 fs decoherence time expected, between weakly coupled bilin pigments, and at room temperature.

Steane's interpretation

Andrew Steane's 2007 paper is treated as the theoretical counterpart: it "elevates to primary status the symmetry principle called the principle of 'contextuality' – the assertion that physical entities cannot possess physical properties in and of themselves." Interactions and correlations are prior to properties, which "arise by a type of symmetry breaking"; entities must be considered in threes, "two to have an interaction, and a third to be influenced by the result"; and unitary evolution is described as 'atemporal', with objective events possible "if and only if some processes are non-reversed". Reed presents this as dissolving the tension between unitary evolution and wave-function collapse.

A directional fine structure constant

The paper's headline evidence is Webb and collaborators' quasar-absorption work: Keck data from the northern sky suggesting α was smaller 12 billion years ago, and Very Large Telescope data from the southern sky suggesting it was larger — "just the very opposite". About 300 measurements are said to show a variation that "is not random but structured, like a bar magnet. The universe appears to have a large alpha on one side and a smaller one on the other." Reed draws two conclusions: that a preferred axis "stands in direct conflict with Einstein's special theory of relativity", and that the result implies a violation of the Einstein Equivalence Principle, possibly indicating a universe far larger than the Hubble volume.

Chameleon fields

Khoury and Weltman's chameleon particle changes its effective mass with the ambient energy density: light and long-ranged in the near-empty cosmos, heavy and confined to a millimetre range on Earth, so that "its effects could indeed remain veiled". Reed reviews the laboratory searches — Fermilab's GammeV photon-regeneration afterglow experiment (null so far), and Brax's proposal to detect chameleons by measuring the force between parallel plates as a function of the density of a neutral gas filling the gap, since increasing gas density screens the chameleon force while leaving Casimir and electrostatic contributions unchanged. He then speculates that environment-dependent mass, if engineered, could allow "the alteration of the mass of an object", and cites the anecdotal "Hutchison effect" — levitation and metal fracturing under combined electromagnetic and electrostatic fields — as a possible precedent.

Equivalence principle in quantum mechanics

Kajari and colleagues showed that while a quantum wave packet in a linear gravitational potential depends only on the ratio of inertial to gravitational mass, "the spatial modulation of the energy eigenfunctions depends on the third root of the product of the two masses", and the discrete spectrum of a particle above an infinitely steep wall depends on the two masses with different fractional powers. Reed reports the Max Planck proposal to drop a Bose–Einstein condensate down a 146 m tower and read the differential expansion of the split matter wave in an atom interferometer as a precision EP test.

Homeopathy

Following Rustum Roy and colleagues, Reed argues that "it is water structure not composition which could have this effect". The key distinction is between the chemist's "structure" (molecules) and the materials scientist's (three-dimensional architecture); water is held to be nano-heterogeneous rather than a homogeneous random network. Structural information could be transferred by epitaxy — "the transmission of structural information from the surface of one material … to another … without transfer of matter composition" — and by succussion, whose rapid pressure changes "may introduce stable nano-colloid bubbles". This, Reed writes, "eliminates the primitive criticism of homeopathy being untenable due to the absence of any remnant of the molecules."

BEC optics and atomtronics

Hau's 1999 experiment slowed light by a factor of 20 million in a sodium condensate at about 50 nK, using a control beam to induce electromagnetically induced transparency and a huge dispersion. Reed then proposes a "quantum telescope": a refracting telescope with "a non-matter plasma trapped BEC serving as a lens", made compact by the condensate's enormous refractive index — conceding that the cryogenics would currently be "the size of St. Paul's Cathedral".

Klaers and colleagues' 2010 photon Bose–Einstein condensate is reported accurately: a dye-filled microcavity between closely spaced mirrors, in which the dye molecules absorb and re-emit photons until they thermalise as a gas of conserved particles rather than ordinary blackbody radiation; above a critical density the excess photons condense, and the work was done at room temperature without cryogenics. Ketterle's assessment is quoted: "a spectacular work of physics that removes one more distinction between atoms and light".

The final experiment is Ramanathan and colleagues' 2011 atomtronic circuit: a toroidal sodium condensate confined by a 1030 nm red-detuned horizontal sheet beam (9 μm vertical half-width) and a Laguerre–Gaussian ring beam of 20 μm radius, with circulation imposed by Raman transfer of quantised angular momentum and detected by the persistence of the central hole in time-of-flight images. A 532 nm blue-detuned "weak link" barrier depletes the local density and, above a critical velocity, stops the superflow — persistent flow lasting a record 40 seconds. Reed reads all of this as one theme: "atomic gases have been made to behave as laser light and now, conversely, photons have been shown to mimic atomic structure, and most amazingly atoms (bosons) may now be able to play the role of electrons (fermions) in a tunable circuit … everything is becoming, or at the very least is capable of masquerading as everything else."

Assessment

The reporting is accurate. This deserves recording, because the paper's method is to relay other people's results and it does so carefully. The Ramanathan atomtronics numbers all match the published experiment (1030 nm sheet, 9 μm half-width, 20 μm Laguerre–Gaussian ring radius, 532 nm weak link, 40 s persistent flow). Hau's factor of 20 million is right: 17 m/s against 299,792,458 m/s is 1.76 × 10⁷, and the ~50 nK condensate temperature is correct. Engel's 77 K, Collini's 400 fs at room temperature, the ~15 Å chromophore spacing, the 5 GHz transmon, the 146 m Bremen drop tower, Leggett and Garg 1985, Khoury and Weltman, and the description of the Klaers photon-BEC mechanism (non-conserved photon number, dye-mediated thermalisation, room temperature) are all faithfully rendered. There is no fabricated result in the paper, and the reference list is real and checkable. That is not always the case in this archive.

The organising concept equivocates. The paper's difficulty is that "contextuality" is used in at least four unrelated senses which are then treated as evidence for one another. In quantum foundations it is a precise technical statement — the Kochen–Specker theorem, that no non-contextual hidden-variable assignment reproduces quantum predictions, i.e. the value assigned to an observable cannot be independent of which commuting set it is co-measured with. In the chameleon model it means something entirely different: a scalar field with a density-dependent effective mass, an ordinary piece of field theory with no relation to Kochen–Specker. In the Webb result it means a spatial gradient in a coupling constant. In the homeopathy section it means that a liquid's properties depend on its structural history — a metaphor. Nothing follows from any one of these to any other. The Kirchmair experiment is a genuine and important result, but it says nothing whatever about whether α varies across the sky, and the paper never supplies a bridge; it supplies a shared word.

The α-dipole claim has not held up, and the relativity argument is wrong. Reed writes that "in the decade that has passed since this discovery, no significant evidence has emerged to contradict this finding", which was not accurate even in 2011 — Chand and colleagues' 2004 VLT analysis had reported a null result an order of magnitude tighter. Since then the position has hardened against the dipole: long-range wavelength-calibration distortions have been identified in both the Keck/HIRES and VLT/UVES spectrographs of exactly the kind that can manufacture a spurious dipole, and the high-precision ESPRESSO measurements at the VLT have found Δα/α consistent with zero at the parts-per-million level. Independently, the Oklo natural fission reactor constrains any change in α over the last 2 × 10⁹ years to below 10⁻⁷, and laboratory atomic-clock comparisons bound the present-day drift at ~10⁻¹⁷ per year. Separately, the claim that a preferred cosmic axis "stands in direct conflict with Einstein's special theory of relativity" is a conceptual error: special relativity constrains the laws, not the matter distribution, and the universe already has a preferred frame in the sense at issue — the one in which the Cosmic Microwave Background dipole vanishes — without any conflict. A spatial gradient in a scalar field is perfectly compatible with local Lorentz invariance. Reed's other conclusion, that varying α would violate the Einstein Equivalence Principle, is correct, since local position invariance is one of the EP's components.

Kajari's result is not a crack in the Equivalence Principle. The section heading asks "Evidence for Cracks in the Equivalence Principle?" and the paper's answer is affirmative, but the cited work shows something different and more modest: that in a quantum system the inertial and gravitational masses can enter the observable spectrum with different fractional powers, so that a quantum experiment can test their equality more sharply than a classical one. If the two masses are equal, everything reduces to the standard result. That is a proposal for a better test, not a reported failure — and the tests that have been run continue to confirm the EP, with torsion-balance experiments constraining the Eötvös parameter to ~10⁻¹³ and the MICROSCOPE satellite to ~10⁻¹⁵.

The photosynthesis interpretation has been overtaken. Reed adopts the 2007–2010 reading that long-lived electronic coherence lets the excitation "simultaneously sample all the energy pathways and choose the most efficient one". That gloss was always a popularisation rather than a result of the transport calculations, and the field has since largely reassigned the long-lived oscillations to vibrational and vibronic coherence in the pigment–protein environment rather than to electronic coherence, with room-temperature electronic coherence times measured at tens rather than hundreds of femtoseconds. The measurements Reed cites are real; the mechanism he draws from them is no longer the consensus reading of them.

The homeopathy section is the weakest, and its problem is not mechanism. Roy's structural argument runs into a direct measurement: femtosecond infrared spectroscopy of liquid water gives hydrogen-bond rearrangement times of about one picosecond, and the network reorganises completely on that scale. No structural imprint can survive for the weeks a remedy sits on a shelf, let alone survive dilution, bottling, and the journey to body temperature. Roy's paper also reports no measurement distinguishing a homeopathic preparation from its solvent — it argues that such a distinction is conceivable, which is a different thing. More fundamentally, the clinical question is settled independently of any mechanism: Shang and colleagues' 2005 Lancet analysis, matching 110 homeopathy trials to 110 conventional-medicine trials, found homeopathy's apparent effects consistent with placebo and shrinking as trial quality rose, and the 2015 Australian NHMRC review of 176 studies found no reliable evidence of efficacy for any of the 61 conditions examined. Explaining how a null effect works is not a contribution. Citing the Hutchison effect as a "precedent" for engineered mass alteration compounds the problem: it has never been independently reproduced under controlled conditions, and the surviving evidence is video and testimony.

The quantum telescope will not work as described. The enormous refractive index Reed invokes is the group index produced by electromagnetically induced transparency — a steep dispersion over a spectral window megahertz wide, sitting on an atomic resonance. The phase index, which is what refracts and images light, stays close to 1, and there is no broadband response at all, so a condensate cannot function as an imaging lens for starlight. The proposal also conflates magnification with light-gathering and resolution: a telescope's resolving power is set by aperture diameter, not by the refractive index of its optics, so nothing about a high-index lens gives "magnification ability comparable to the Keck telescope" — which is in any case a reflector, not a refractor. The stray phrase "photons, even those with a slight mass" in the photon-BEC discussion is loose in the same way: photons are massless, and the effective mass they acquire from cavity confinement, which is what makes the Klaers experiment work, is a different quantity.

What the essay is good for. As a survey of a specific slice of 2007–2011 experimental physics — state-independent contextuality, macroscopic Leggett–Garg violation, quantum coherence in light-harvesting complexes, photon condensation, and the first closed atom circuit — it is a competent and readable digest with an honest bibliography, and it is unusual in this archive for putting genuine mainstream experiments at the centre rather than attacking them. Its instinct that these results share something is not unreasonable; the trouble is that the shared thing is named rather than shown. Where the paper leaves surveying for advocacy, in the homeopathy, Hutchison and free-energy sections, it neither supplies evidence nor engages with the evidence that already exists against the claims.

See also

• Donald Reed — the author
• Fine Structure Constant, Equivalence Principle, Dark Energy — the constants and principles under challenge
• Bell's Theorem, EPR Paradox, Quantum Entanglement, Quantum mechanics — the contextuality results
• Casimir Effect, Photon, Light, Speed of Light, Blackbody Radiation
• Category:Cold Fusion, Category:Propulsion