Well, the TEDx conferences i think are a lot
like speed dating.
There's basically no subject worth
knowing that you can possibly understand
in eighteen minutes.
So i decided that I was going to give 
nine minutes to two subjects.
A better speed dating model i think...
So: both of the things that i'm gonna talk
about today
are rooted in physics,
and since we started out in physics i
might as well tell you a comment made
by
Ernest Rutherford
-guaranteed to offend everybody-, it hangs
prominently in the Yale physics
department, which is:
"In science
there is only physics
everything else is stamp collecting."
So, predictable catastrophes is rooted in
the subject now called
econophysics
basically it's the idea
that the worst catastrophes -especially
the human made ones, which are most
pertinent to us now-
are the most predictable.
But in fact everybody ignores it.
And then the subject of quantum biology
-or in particular, quantum diseases-
is a longer term concept. It's something
that i think will involve over the next
twenty years and will dramatically
change the way we understand how biology
operates, and in particular how medicine
operates.
So let's get going!
This is a famous scene of tyrone power
on the left,
in the great movie the Black Swan.
Now, some of you may now of Nassim
Taleb's really really excellent book
entitled the Black Swan;
basically it talks about how financial
catastrophes occur
and people are very rarely prepared for them.
He took an approach to investing
which is basically the following:
you hemorrhage a tiny tiny little bit of
money every year
to buy insurance against a gigantic
collapse,
and then finally after you've
hemorrhaged enough -if you've done the
math properly,
if the statistics work out as you
predict they're going to work-
you make a gigantic bundle of money.
And he actually did run a hedge fund and
worked with a bunch of other
hedge funds taking that approach.
On the left is the Black Swan the famous
pirate,
on the right the good guy -of course- the
financial system
which is now on the ropes.
But there's a very interesting subtlety
here which Taleb himself
understands.
And that is the fact
that Black Swan events;
rare events that occur
not to commonly but are very big
have a particular characteristic
that makes them
very difficult to predict,
but then at the other extreme there are
actually much worse events,
true gigantic catastrophes.
And those gigantic catastrophes 
are actually easier to
predict.
Here is a analogy up on the screen.
I happen to draw up from the
demographics of cities,
but i could have given an almost
identical diagram that comes from
essentially every domain
in the natural world and especially in
the human world.
If you look at the pale,
square dots you'll see that they form a
line.
The story that's been told by that
straight line is actually very simple.
It says,
that the frequency
of events is inversely proportionate to
how large they are.
Really big events
occur rarely,
much smaller events occur much more
commonly,
and if you scale the axes properly,
it turns out to be a perfect
straight line,
with more than ninety-nine percent
level of correlation. Very very strong
law.
But it turns out
that if you look at the
extreme tail, a very very large events
and that's the red spot all the way up
at the top,
it falls on off the line.
This particular example is the scaling of
cities in France,
-following an almost perfect
straight line-, with the sole exception of
Paris.
Now what does that story tell you?
It tells you that very frequently the
most important events
out outliers,
that are the exception to the rule,
but actually are the dominant events
that drive
the world.
Now we have just lived
part way through,
such an example in the financial world.
And it turns out
that this particular financial
catastrophy
left a footprint of predictability well
in advance of its occurrence.
So you can ask yourself
two questions:
if it was so predictable,
why didn't people predict it?
And second: What would happen..? Is it
possible to -quote-
"save the world" if you could
have essencially everybody
know this and take action on it?
Well, here the two answers.
One is: it is in the nature
of human beings
psychologically evolutionarily there are many
theories about this
to discount
a high level of risk,
and to replace it with unwarranted
optimism.
And therefore
people do not take seriously
predictions of catastrophy, until it's
too late.
Now, of course it's not always true,
but if you think back
with a somewhat jaundiced eye to the
history of humankind;
think about the wars
and the terrible events that have
occurred,
and how much ink is spilled afterwards
explaining how the events occurred,
and how they could have been prevented,
and the rarity -with which really
catastrophic events in human affairs are
averted-,
you can begin to understand how
difficult it is
to take action.
Significant action on what is in fact
-as it turns out mathematically-
in much more predictable set of events
which often are the largest and worst.
So now let's ask a question what if
everybody did in fact
take action, for example in the recent
financial crisis?
What if the governments all over the
world,
as well as individuals
were to have
acted
in concert
to prevent
the occurrence of such a catastrophic
event?
The short answer is:
Under those circumstances
nobody would have been able to avert it.
And the reason is;
that these extreme events -think about
the growth of the city like Paris-
come from what is known as a hurting
effect.
It's the consequence of positive
feedback, it's what's known in real
estate as:
location, location, location.
McDonald's builds
in a particular spot and that
doesn't actually cause competitors to go
elsewhere, it induces competitors to go
to the same place,
and you begin to develop and urban
cluster,
which intern has a positive effect on
the development of more clustering,
and the same thing occurs in the attempt
-in any wide spread attempt-, to
prevent a catastrophic
occurrence in the financial markets.
When enough people begin to believe that
a catastrophic event is going to occur
and start taking action as a herd of any
sort,
they actually build in
the kind of mechanisms that lead to a
bubble and ultimately
to a crash.
So this is an extremely difficult and
intractable problem,
except for the fact
that some people can save themselves.
I understand that that's
not the title of the conference,
conference in entitled:
Who then is going to save their own
skins?
However,
that is part of the reality.
These events
-and leave this image for you to think of-
can be titled Dragon Kings as opposed
to Black Swans. Black Swans exist
at the end of a continuum
of a kind of straight line very law obeying,
are very difficult to predict,
whereas Dragon Kings are the
dominating the events in human society
and predictable. Though they may be,
people do not
take action on them.
The worst catastrophes are the most
predictable,
but they never actually are
acted upon.
Next: subject number two.
This little dance up here
is any schematic picture, it's not actually 
anything genuine,
but it's a representation
of very very tiny proteins folding.
This protein schematically
-in particular-
is a kind of protein called a prion
once these were thought of as protein
fragments,
and then
it was understood that something very
bizarre was happening with them;
which is these little protein fragments
actually were capable of replicating
themselves.
Now that's a very simple
statement it has very very deep
implications,
because the whole development of modern
biology,
especially into the air of DNA and
the understanding of the mechanisms,
whereby DNA replicates
and whereby DNA serves as a blueprint
for a living cell,
has a deep history both in theoretical
computation,
as well as simply in the idea that here
is the fundamental mechanism where
self replication
and the spreading of living systems can
occur and must occur.
What I really said there is that you have
research into
the actual physical structure of DNA
and then you have
theoretical notions that go back to John von Neumann,
about what would be necessary
for a living system and he -before
DNA was even discovered-
on theoretical grounds came
up with the argument that for
living systems to reproduce themselves
they would have to be
a kind of carrier structure, which was
the living thing itself. And then it
would have to carry a blueprint of
itself
internally. And ultimately when DNA was
discovered of course,
it turned out that he was remarkably
correct. As he was about so many other
things.
The shocking thing about
prions is, that these little protein
fragments
carry no nucleic acid of any sort.
They are
simply proteins.
They are small enough
so that we are on the verge almost of
being able to visualize them atom by
atom. So not quite visible to the naked eye
-smaller than that of course-,
but they're incredibly
-one would think- simple structures and
yet they replicate themselves.
If you look
at what happens when a protein -here is 
an example of a protein-.
If you look at what happens
when a protein
goes from a kind of stretched out
ribbon
which is...
...you don't visualize it that way, but if
you learn about what a protein is you
learn of course as i'm sure you all know
that it's a 
backbone of of a certain kind of
chemical,
and then you have these amino acids
hanging off that backbone into the
sequence of amino acids
that constitutes the protein. However,
the reality is, that the most subtle
structures and biological functions of
proteins occur when this ribbon
folds into a biologically active form,
that biologically active form
is the most condensed version.
I'm speaking very loosely here; lowest 
energy state. But think of it as
condensed, it's the most
condensed version
out of trillions of possible folding
configurations.
Proteins get into that state
like that. And it may take up to a minute or
two, for especially large
proteins, but according to any standard 
information theory notions
or theories of computation:
Many of the most important biologically
active proteins in our own bodies
should take hundreds and hundreds of
years
to find
that low-energy configuration.
And yet they do it
lightning quickly. Life itself 
would absolutely not be possible	
-not for this astounding capacity
the protein seem to have-
to seek out this lowest
energy confirmation.
How do they do it? -
- That has been one of the biggest
mysteries in biochemistry.
I would say up until recently
when it began to be understood that they
depended upon
quantum mechanical effects
i'm not going to go into the details of
what constitutes all the
quantum mechanical effects,
but here's a simple way of thinking
about it:
Entire atoms
-hydrogen atoms in particular-
can instantaneously vanish at one point
in the backbone,
reappear elsewhere,
and that process of transmission
from one spot to another
can occur concurrently
as though in multiple universes. -It is a
phrase that you've probably heard before-
And so the energy space is searched out
using this astounding magical process
and amongst all the different
configurations that are being sampled
essentially instantaneously
the lowest one is therefore picked out.
Prions -because they are so small-
have a much more dominating
role for these quantum effects.
And it turns out that prions -which
you may know of because of
bovine spongiform encephalopathy, mad cow
disease-
it's also been learned
they are absolutely essential
to the normal functioning of neurons.
In fact it is in the structure and folding of
prions
that long-term normal memory
appears to be significantly embedded.
What this means -those of you want to
look into this further just simply
go online and look lookup Susan Lindquist
at the Whitehead Institute-
what this means is that there is
apparently and internal
layered biology
that has only now just
been suspected to exist,
that is much much more primitive
then... -certainly then life as we know
what at our scale- much more primitive
then cells, much more primitive then even
nucleic acid and the way it lives,
and yet the has this astounding
computational capacity
through its employment
of quantum effects.
These are pictures of prions
on the right is a natural one on the
left is one synthesized in the
laboratory.
You can thank about this as
nature's original nanotechnology.
And for the same reasons that modern
synthetic technology using carbon
and other non organic materials
have to take into account the peculiar
affect
of quantum mechanics because the scale
is so small
apparently nature was there well ahead of
us
a couple of billion years ago and has
incorporated it into the very structure of
our beings.
In last comment: You'll notice that stip
of white missing
that was a cheap and
quick way to get a point to
cross, it's not an error in the slide.
It's the fact that even within DNA
as well, there are quantum mechanical
transfers of entire atoms -simple ones:
hydrogen atoms in particular-
for as far as a hundred base pairs.
In other words even when we
go up to the level of DNA,
there are quantum mechanical effects
that determine
the very structure of life as we know
it.
Now this idea that you cannot use a
purely deterministic mechanistic
conception of
how living cells operate,
how DNA operates how RNA operates,
how illnesses occur, how cancer occurs
how alzheimer's disease occurs
is something that is only just now
beginning to reach public awareness.
I gave a talk at
professor Tipler's University
about five or ten years ago
to his credit. The head of the the
biochemistry department actually stood
up and acknowledged that it wasn't
even a challenge,
that he had never heard
of quantum mechanical effects in
biochemistry. That's an
index
of how new the idea is. It's an index as well
of where we're going that now finally
there is an entire journal dedicated to
this.
Quantum effects will allow, allow for
life
and they cause the most intractable
diseases.
And i leave you with the quotation from
Richard Feynmann:
"Physics is imagination,
but imagination in a straight jacket
it's important to get both parts of that
equation correct." - Thank you very much!
