The Human Quantum Number

As a computer programmer for more than 30 years I was given nearly unlimited opportunities to work on projects in any field of choice because the demand for computer programs greatly exceeded the supply in every field.

Writing a computer program often requires a deep and thorough understanding of the process, procedure, or system being programmed. So, some programmers develop the skill of quick learning and of acquiring information from as many as needed different sources. One measure of the success of a computer program is the satisfaction of the user who asked for the program in the first place.

As an optimistic ambitious programmer preparing to write a computer program to simulate the human hearing process, I had to learn a lot of neurophysiology and biophysics information. In a physiology textbook whose title did not seem important at the time, I read that there is a single nerve bundle between the top of Auditory Cortex and the top of the Visual Cortex. I surmised that either the 2 different cortex sections used a common code or language to communicate with each other or that light and sound in some heretofore unknown way must have something in common. I decided to see if I could discover what was going on or what it was that they had in common because that information might make my simulator better in some way.

Computers are exact, linear, and can be unforgiving if only 1 out of 1 billion bits of information is incorrect. Mother Nature is approximate, nonlinear, and gets by quite nicely even when many bits of information are incorrect. Life science is a field of work and study where relative, approximate, nonlinear, and uncertainty were the norm long before quantum physics or Mr. Heisenberg even existed.

It should not be much of a surprise when a computer programmer uncovers new details as the result of a tenacious pursuit to find the “common” factor of light and sound or vision and hearing.  My garage was full of pictures, drawings of body organs and parts on transparency papers, and diagrams that were hanging in ways that made it easy to overlay one or more pages to see if they might reveal anything in common.

After many weeks of library visits, research, investigations, experiments, and re-examinations, I was ready to concede defeat to the mystery of living systems. As I pondered my energy expenditure without satisfying results, I was looking on at the page in the Princeton University Physics 1 textbook that was open in front of me and wondered how or why Albert Einstein came up with c² for his E = mc² equation. I said to myself “if he can square the speed of light to get his results then I may as well take the square root to see if gives me my results”.

That was 23 years ago in 1984 and I am still in shock and awe today over what happened next...