Physics and Consciousness

Catalog description

We will explore the basic classical and quantum physics concepts, and link themto newly observed physical phenomena and technologies, as well as to brain research, in the context of tools that physicists helped bring about like the seminal magnetic resonance imaging. The course content is mostly physics, although we link it to cognitive sciences, but the main focus is on motivating and explaining the basic physical laws behind new phenomena and related technologies. Examples include wave-particle duality and its relevance for technological applications, behavior of spin particles in a magnetic field to explain magnetic resonance imaging, ion flow through ion channels and ohm's law to explain electrical signal flow in our body, and other examples within the core of physics and bridging to interdisciplinary areas of material science and devices, biology and neuroscience. As we learn about particle spins, we will talk about brain imaging studies enabled by Nobel winning physics research. We will then discuss consciousness and free will, and read original texts by Schrodinger, Einstein and other physicists, and our course discussion will be uniquely motivated by related physical phenomena and experiments, including quantum entanglement and relativity of space and time. I will explain the basic ideas behind quantum computing and information processing, and we we learn about basic quantum logicgates and Dirac's matrix formalism in quantum mechanics.