New State of Matter?

I am used to hear current opinions in different areas of my interest. If you have read this Blog you may know what some of my interests are. The opinions I am more interested about are scientific opinions. What I write about in this post is consciousness.

To be alive is to be conscious. I feel that as time passes I am more aware, maybe after some point in the twilight of my life I will slowly loose consciousness, but so far I feel that I understand more.

Xiao-Gang Wen from MIT has worked for several years on the idea of Spin Networks. Related to this theoretical work recently MIT experimental physicists produced in the laboratory a material that may represent a new state of matter. This material has sets of three frustrated electrons that try to all point in the same direction to produce local order but they cannot. Instead they produce topological order. Quantum Mechanics tells us that electrons can entangle. As far as I know this coordination can be of very long range. I write here the ideas formed in my head after I read of a possible new state of matter.

Quantum Mechanics as we know it allows quantum coordination. This coherence is intrinsically quantum mechanical. Identical electrons are described by a wave function; when two of them are put in each others place the wave function changes sign. This has objective consequences we can see, entanglement is one of these. It is like if any two electrons are aware of each other even if they are at far away places. The whole universe has a source of coordination because of this identical electron phenomenon.

Professor Wen was one of the first to realize that quarks could be made out of other objects that are quantum coordinated. He chose the three frustrated electron case to study this idea. Now experimentally a herbertsmithite pure form has shown the very properties Wen discovered theoretically.

Condensed matter physics again is showing the way forward, as Robert Laughlin from Stanford and a Nobel Laureate has been saying all along.

If it is true that elementary particles are not elementary, we should look at the principles of coordination in the Universe. Entanglement is definitely one of those coordinations we have to look into.

Maybe coordination comes from the fact that the whole Universe as we know it came from a very small region of space. It is like all human beings share almost the same genome because all of us come a group of a few thousand individuals out of central Africa around a hundred thousand years ago.