♪ FUTURISTIC SYNTHESIZER MUSIC (Erika) Welcome to New Frontiers, a show that's all about exploring the science, discovery, and innovation happening at the University of Arizona.

I'm your host, Erica Hamden, and for this episode, we'll be exploring big ideas in the tiniest of spaces by peering into the world of the quantum.

Join me in searching for answers to some of the most profound mysteries in science.

Things like consciousness, the fundamental nature of reality, and even the origin of life.

What's all that got to do with quantum mechanics?

Come along and find out.

♪ FUTURISTIC SYNTHESIZER MUSIC (Erika) Later on, I'll be meeting with the director of the U of A Center for Consciousness Studies, who has spent the last 30 years working to prove his theory of quantum consciousness.

New evidence from NASA-collected asteroid samples might provide clues for how the quantum nature of consciousness could explain the origin of life in the universe.

Get ready for that to blow your mind.

But first, I'm going to chat with physics professor, Mohammad Hassan.

His team has recently had a major breakthrough by inventing the world's fastest electron microscope.

It is so fast that it can capture pictures of electrons in motion and could soon be used to test quantum theories like never before.

(Anchor) Mohammed Hassan is an assistant professor of physics and optical sciences.

His goal is to photograph an electron in motion.

It's never been done before.

(Mohammed) I still remember the date, 24th of April, 2022, the first image of the electron motion.

And I think we are as a scientist, work so hard for years for the glory and the sweetness of this such a moment.

It's just this moment when you see something nobody's seen before.

A lot of open questions now becomes available with the Attomicroscope and the capability of doing it, it's difficult, but since it's difficult, this is a job for us to do.

♪ CALM PIANO MUSIC So what you see in my lab, there are two directions.

The first one focusing on developing ultrafast optoelectronics and light field synthesizer.

And then when we work through the lab, you see the big laser which generates very short laser pulses and we make this pulse very broad by propagating through a hollow fiber where you see the laser turn from red, yellow, and blue.

And we use this to control the electrons inside the material so it can reflect light on and off in an atom second time scale.

The atom second is one out of billion of billion of a second.

And why is this important?

Because this is a native time of the motion of electrons.

So if you would like to take a picture of a faster train moving next to you, probably you will see an blurry image.

However, if I put you on a train next to this faster train and they are both moving with the same speed, you will be able to take a very good snapshot of the other of the other train.

Here the electrons are the first train and my atom microscope is the second train.

So I open for you the capability of seeing electrons in real time and space.

♪ SOFT PIANO MUSIC ♪ Electromotion is everywhere around us.

Electromotion is the reason we are feeling because the electrons move in our nervous system.

The electrons are the reason why we see, because this how is the images form in front of our eyes.

Electromotion control chemistry and control all the properties of matter.

So the capability of seeing it will allow us to control it.

If we control electron, we can control chemistry, we can control the physics of the material, all the behavior of the material, we can advance the technology, we can make new electronics.

-So this is now optimized.

My next goal is to develop a quantum atom microscope to test the fundamental quantum physics questions or quantum physics principles.

Quantum physics in general talking about the probabilities of motion of photons or motion of electrons.

We may be able one day to test this in our microscope.

We'd like to discover more secrets about the electron motion in everything around us.

♪ SOFT PIANO MUSIC All of us has this dream from the beginning.

We promise each other to success.

So I'm so fortunate to work with these talented young scientists and work together as a family.

♪ SOFT PIANO MUSIC And I feel like this is one also of my duties, not just discovering new science, is to teach the young, talented scientists.

We are not passionate just about achievement.

We are passionate by science, and science will never end.

Never, ever, lose faith in science.

Science is our way forward to advance our humanity, to advance our country, and I think it is our destiny as a scientist to not rest.

Just keep doing science.

So I'm here with physics professor Mohammad Hassan, who is the inventor of the world's fastest electron microscope.

So, Mohammad, I'm so excited to be here because this is the kind of stuff that can like change our understanding of quantum mechanics, right?

-Right.

So this is an attomicroscopy 2.0.

-Ok -So this is a quantum version of it.

Here it will be more advanced than the other one and will give us more capability for more applications.

-That's so amazing.

So aren't you violating the uncertainty principle by taking a picture of an electron?

-It's a very interesting question.

We are not aiming to violate the uncertainty principle.

Definitely the uncertainty principle is there, but the question nobody answers so far and we would like to be the first to answer this.

How is this uncertainty changing over time?

-I cannot wait to see these results because it's like the most fundamental quantum mechanics is to be able to ask those questions and get an answer.

So this is probably too early to ask you, but you had the microscope 1.0 and now 2.0.

Is there a 3.0?

-So I have an dream.

And this dream is to first establish the ultrafast quantum imaging center.

We would like also to combine some of the new technology artificial intelligence for imaging processing from the atom microscope to make our life easier.

So this is a lot of dreams and a lot of-- -It's very exciting!

Oh my gosh.

-This is why we are doing science, right?

Yes.

It's so cool to get to see it.

This has been so amazing.

And I know you don't want me to say it, but I'm so excited for when you win a Nobel Prize for finding out more stuff about quantum mechanics.

Thank you so much, Erica.

I am interested and looking forward to invite you next time to show you some of our videos of electro-emotion.

-I cannot wait.

Thank you so much.

-Thank You (Erika) I'm on my way to the Arizona Astrobiology Center to meet with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff.

Back in the 1990s, he teamed up with Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Sir Roger Penrose Together, they developed a profound new theory of quantum consciousness.

Today, that theory is getting tested by astrobiologist Dante Loretta, who most recently captained NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission.

That is the mission we've covered in previous episodes, which sent a spacecraft to collect a sample from an ancient asteroid and return that sample back to Earth for scientific study.

Some of those samples are housed right here at the University of Arizona, and I got to see them.

Loretta thinks he may have found clues to Hamorov's theory of consciousness in the asteroid sample, and that it might provide evidence that consciousness preceded life.

You do not want to miss this story, so check it out and join us for the discussion afterwards.

Pleased to introduce Stuart Hameroff, professor at the University of Arizona, active in the Center for Consciousness Studies.

So Stuart, you are on the cutting edge of quantum physics and consciousness.

-Yes Greg, I think quantum physics is the key to consciousness.

(Stuart) You know going back to the Greeks there's been this controversy between whether the brain produces consciousness or some part of consciousness is out in the universe that we access.

And quantum physics allows us to sort of bridge that gap and actually favors being able to access parts of consciousness and the essential features of consciousness which are present in the universe by working through the brain.

♪ INSPIRING PIANO MUSIC Consciousness is the only thing that matters.

If you don't have consciousness, you don't have anything really.

You can use words like awareness, phenomenal experience, qualia, subjectivity, first person point of view.

Everybody has a term for it.

I don't think it can really be described in words.

♪ UPLIFTING STRING MUSIC I'm Stuart Hammeroff.

I'm a retired anesthesiologist and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona.

I'm currently working as a research professor in the Arizona Astrobiology Center, looking for the origin of life and consciousness.

♪ GENTLE PIANO MUSIC I actually got interested in consciousness in a cancer lab studying cell division - mitosis, how cells divide and the chromosomes are pulled apart chromosomes are pulled apart by structures called mitotic spindles, which turned out to be microtubules, which I'd never heard of before.

They're basically polymers of a protein called tubulin, and they will spontaneously assemble into these beautiful cylindrical lattices.

At that moment, microtubules were discovered to also be in neurons, so the brain was full of microtubules, and they're uniquely arranged in parts of the neuron, the dendrites and the soma, completely different than they are in all other biology.

I went on to move to Arizona, met the chair of the anesthesiology department.

He said, "Come to your residency.

You can investigate how anesthesia works to selectively prevent consciousness, which nobody understands."

And he handed me a paper by a friend of his showing that anesthesia depolymerized microtubules, which are the structures that I'd become interested in.

One thing about anesthesia that's really interesting and hard to explain is that it only affects consciousness while other brain activities continue.

And my work in anesthesia has shown that anesthesia works pretty much the same on all animals and even plants.

So that tells me the consciousness is probably biologically the same.

(Narrator) An interesting question is if anesthetics can have an influence on plants like this Venus flytrap?

(Stuart) Most people would say, most people in neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, would say the brain is a complex computer of simple neurons.

In a computer, you have enough bits of one or zero.

You hook them up by connections, put in input and get an output.

They're not realizing or don't consider that a single cell organism doesn't have any synapses.

It's not in a network.

It's not in a multicellular system.

It's just one cell.

And its microtubules act as its nervous system.

And I think the microtubules act as the nervous system for all cells.

So if a paramecium or amoeba can be clever, I think it's an insult to neurons to say that they're a simple one or a zero.

And then in the 80s, several prominent books came out like this book by Roger Penrose.

The first half of the book argued against the idea that consciousness was a computation.

Roger argued that this meant that things like understanding needed something outside the computational system of the brain.

And for that, he brought in quantum mechanics and quantum physics.

At small scales, particles can be waves.

So a particle can be in two more places at the same time.

It can be here, here, here, here, like a wave, or just here and here, in what's called quantum superposition.

But Roger said that the separation in space time is unstable, and after a time given by a very simple equation, the uncertainty principle, it would collapse to one or the other.

And when that happened, and here was the kicker, it would give a moment of conscious experience, a proto-conscious experience.

And it's happening not only in our brains, but it's happening in the environment, in the table, everywhere, at a very microscopic level.

But one issue we have in consciousness is, how do we have something at a very, very tiny scale, scale up to one collective conscious thought at a time, as opposed to a gazillion different things going on?

And I thought of it as kind of like, if you go to the symphony before they start playing, all the musicians are tuning their instruments.

♪ BAND WARMUP To a non-musician like me, it sounds like noise.

♪ BAND MUSIC And then they start playing, Brahms, Beethoven, the Beatles, whatever, and it's music.

♪ ORCHESTRAL MUSIC So, the difference between the proto-conscious noise and the music, is what the brain does to these objective reductions that are everywhere in the environment.

And for that, you need some kind of instrument, something they can organize or orchestrate But Roger said I don't know what it is.

And I read this book and I said, "Damn, he's talking about microtubules.

He needs them."

And I wrote him a letter.

I told him about microtubules, and I said, "I'm gonna be in England for a meeting.

I'd love to come by and talk to you about this."

He said, "Please do."

So I got on a train from London and went to Oxford and met him.

And we just started talking about microtubules and consciousness and developing our theory.

[ TRAIN RAILS ] I invited him to the first consciousness conference I was planning, the Science of Consciousness, which I've organized for the University of Arizona for the last 30 years.

This was the first one in 1994.

[ BACKGROUND NOISE ] (Roger) But what about consciousness?

What do I mean by that?

Well, I'm not going to attempt to define it because I think it would be a mistake to try and define it.

(Stuart) If you go into the microtubules and into the quantum world, then you get non-locality.

(Roger) There is something outside the computational laws of physics.

(Stuart) People say we've got to define consciousness, but we also have to define life.

[ TYPING ] I'm also interested in life and evolution, and I've come to the conclusion that life, even very simple life, needs consciousness.

Otherwise, why have all this purposeful behavior?

What's the point?

And I wrote a paper about it, and about two years ago, I got an email from Dante Lauretta, who had been in charge of a NASA program called OSIRIS-REx.

♪ HEAVENLY MUSIC (Announcer) Status check.

Go, Atlas.

Go, Centaur.

Go, OSIRIS-REx.

10 seconds, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

And lift off of OSIRIS-REx (Dante) OSIRIS-REx is a mission in NASA's new frontier program Where we built a spacecraft to rendevous with a near earth asteroid named Bennu.

Survey it in great detail.

Collect a sample from its surface and bring it back to earth for scientific analysis.

(Announcer) "O-REx has descended below the 5 meter mark.

The hazard map is go for tag."

"And we have touchdown!"

[ CHEERING ] (Dante) And on September 24th of 2023, that capsule landed in the Utah desert, and I could finally start to think about the amazing science that we were going to get in addressing some of the deepest questions that we ask ourselves.

Where did we come from?

And I went back to our original proposal and I read the line that said, "Analysis of this material will provide unprecedented knowledge about the origin of life."

And I thought, "How am I going to do that?"

So I went to work.

I started reading through the scientific literature and I came across a paper called, "The Quantum Origin of Life."

And I looked at the author and it was somebody named Stuart Hammeroff.

And I got online and I researched him and I was like, "He's at the University of Arizona.

He's literally right across the street from my office."

I emailed him right away.

I said, "We need to talk."

And we set up our first meeting.

- Hey, Dante.

- Hey, Stuart.

- How you doing?

- Good to see you, man.

Come on in.

We've got some exciting new results from the OSIRIS-REx samples.

What I came to realize is he's talking about life using quantum information to give it an evolutionary advantage.

And if that's the case, could that be the secret to the origin of life?

The first biomolecules arose out of the din of the chemical background because they were able to process quantum information.

Going up and around.

And you get these little cores inside the serpentine, the clay minerals.

When we look at the samples from the asteroid, what jumps out is when you hit them with an ultraviolet light, they are fluorescent.

They're capturing those photons, and they're releasing it back as visible light.

That right there is a quantum process.

Looks like a galaxy full of stars.

We've got all the nucleobases.

All the letters of the genetic code are in this asteroid sample.

We have an enormous number of amino acids, including the ones that are central to the quantum information in these microtubule proteins, the aromatic amino acids.

And there's three of them, phenylalanine, tyrosine, and the one everybody's familiar with, tryptophan.

And it seems like tryptophan is the secret ingredient there.

It's the most complex amino acid.

It has a double ring.

It can enter into multiple quantum states.

And it has a very familiar structure.

It's at the center of all the major psychedelic compounds.

They all have that indole ring, which is central to the tryptophan amino acid.

And I was like, OK, well, that's a clue.

So the red in that map is just telling you the distribution of carbon.

And so what I started to talk about with Stuart is maybe life and consciousness might be two sides of the same coin.

That's why these molecules might start to self-organize.

Now all of a sudden, they have agency.

You think we could test the consciousness first theory?

(Stuart) Yeah, we could then see if the fluorescence is inhibited by anesthesia proportional to anesthetic potency.

One of the things that Dante is real excited about are nanoglobules.

So in the samples, he sees these globules that are encrusted and hollow inside, and they're fluorescent, which means they have aromatic rings inside.

I mean, you can tell it's highly concentrated in carbon.

There are these little spheres of organic material.

And when we look at them in cross-section, we can see they look very much like a cell membrane.

Sometimes they have fluid inside of them.

Sometimes they have fibers of minerals.

And they look for all the world like what we think a basic protocell would be.

So here you have a critical step in the origin of life, encapsulation.

What really struck me about this one is it looks like it's going through cell division.

If we could link it to quantum information, collapse of a wave function, and maybe even the origin of consciousness, that would be an amazing discovery.

(Stuart) Which is actually a pretty viable idea because it makes more sense about life.

- I agree.

♪ INSPIRING MUSIC Thinking about consciousness and working in this area has enriched my life tremendously.

I can't imagine a more interesting and important topic.

In our view, if you have consciousness by this very simple process, that will happen in space-time geometry everywhere, then consciousness is part of the fabric of reality.

(Dante) This would say that every living thing has some sense of consciousness, a sense of self, a sense of agency.

And for me, that just rings true.

(Stuart) And we're part of it.

We're part of nature.

I think all living things have microtubules.

They're all resonating and have coherent entanglement and we're probably connected to them in some way.

So I think we're resonating and in tune with the universe.

♪ GENTLE MUSIC So I'm here with Stuart Hameroff.

Stuart, it's so great to meet you.

And I'm like so excited to talk more about quantum consciousness because it feels weird to be like, oh, is this conscious?

Is like a plant conscious?

Like you can put a Venus flytrap under anesthesia and then it doesn't respond.

And like, I think that I'm upset about that.

Well, you don't want to suffer -Like what do you think is ha- if you have to do surgery on them.

But on the other hand, we're gonna eat them, so... -I know, that's what I mean.

-Well but they would hav- And I'm picking the fruit without anesthesia.

-That's true, but remember, they're only having you know a few conscious moments per second.

And whereas we're having millions.

I think there are conscious moments everywhere in the universe, but at a very, very tiny scale.

Roger Penrose came up with this as a solution to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics.

What happens to superpositions?

He first characterized the superpositions as separations in space-time based on general relativity.

So every tiny particle is a tiny curvature in space-time.

And a particle here and here is two opposing curvatures.

But he said the separations are unstable and after a time, T will reduce or collapse to one or the other And that would produce a moment of consciousness.

As opposed to consciousness causing collapse, which is a previous theory.

So he put consciousness into the universe at a very fundamental level.

And our brains come along, and the microtubules come along and organize and orchestrate that into something more like music.

(Erika) Ok, so one of the big challenges in quantum computing is really getting the system entangled and stable.

And so I'm curious if you have ways of testing that with the microtubules.

-Right.

So we've been looking at individual microtubules measuring quantum states and quantum processes in microtubules and see that they do last long enough for what we need and that they go away with anesthesia.

And we know at the level of microtubules we have frequencies in not just Hertz as the EEG of cycles per second, but a thousand Hertz, a million Hertz, a billion Hertz, a trillion Hertz and even faster inside the microtubules going down every three orders of magnitude.

And this is called a- we think this is a time crystal which has been proposed in physics but never seen in biology until now.

And that's what we're looking for in our samples from the asteroid, from Bennu, to look for possibilities of time crystal behavior in very simple molecules.

-So can you explain what a time crystal is?

Cause I haven't heard that.

-Right Good Question Well, crystal like a quartz or salt is when you have an atom or a molecule that repeats in a periodic spatial array.

In a dynamic system, you could have a dynamic, a pattern of activity that repeats at different frequencies.

So for example- -Like waves.

Waves, like we see three waves, and each wave has three waves.

So it's called a triplet of triplet.

And this is seen in a microtubule.

at all of these different frequencies.

And there's some suggestion that we're seeing triplets of triplets in the fine-scale structure of the universe itself in space-time geometry when you get close to the Planck scale, to the very, very tiniest level of reality.

And so we think it may be the triplets are actually in the microtubules in the brain are resonating and tuned into triplets going on in the universe going all the way down to the fundamental level.

That feels like a lot.

Well, Stuart, it has been so fun talking with you, and like, learning about this has just been very, like, mind expanding, I think.

And I hope it's been really mind expanding for you too.

Thank you for joining us on this all new episode of New Frontiers.

I'm Erika Hamden, and I'll see you next time.

Make sure to stay tuned for future episodes where we'll explore more of the incredible innovation happening here at the University of Arizona.

And if you want to know what's happening with me, follow my Instagram @erika.hamden.