The Form of Life and Natural Laws

I once heard a story from a great mentor to whom I owe a great deal, about the time when the Kamiokande water tank had just been completed. He told me that the sensitivity of the massive photomultiplier tubes plastered all over the walls was so incredible that even the faint light emitted by the tiny microorganisms living in the water as they died was visible as noise. I remember feeling a bit sentimental, thinking that even the smallest insect has a soul.

This seems to have been when the tank was first filled with water. These were microorganisms that had been adhering to the tank in trace amounts. It appears that the chemical substances, which were separated by cell membranes while the organisms were alive, mixed together when those membranes broke down, causing a chemical reaction that produced light. I hear that the field of researching photons emitted by living organisms (biophotons) has also been expanding significantly in recent years. Meanwhile, the development of high-performance measuring instruments based on quantum measurement theory and quantum information theory to capture such faint light is also progressing. Such collaboration between life sciences and physics may bring humanity major discoveries in this century.

The fundamental chemical phenomena in life are described by a single equation representing the action of quantum electrodynamics. However, one should not say that this explains all life phenomena. This equation is like a piece of compressed, encoded data, and the decoding performed by nature produces an infinitely diverse array of living things and life phenomena. This equation is like an infinite compression of an infinite dictionary.

The prediction that all physical laws will be elucidated and that future textbooks containing them will only include a finite number of equations is, I believe, a remnant of the bad reductionism in the field of elementary particles. Even if the laws of the universe were condensed into a single equation, it would be nothing more than an infinitely compressed encoded symbol, and to understand the universe, one would need to decode it infinitely.

The same is true for the equation below, which extends quantum electrodynamics to represent the action (the fundamental quantity that determines motion) of various basic objects in modern physics.

This, too, is merely a symbol that has infinitely compressed the known laws of the universe. It is scientifically invalid to claim that writing only this action equation constitutes the entirety of the laws of the universe. This is because the cosmic code contained within the action equation cannot be decoded without mobilizing everything from the universe's initial conditions and boundary conditions to, at times, the anthropic principle.

Furthermore, exploring how to use the action equation itself is essential. Only by substituting (inputting) it into quantum mechanics is the action equation translated and begins to describe nature. The profound question of why nature adopted the law of quantum mechanics itself has now become one of the major themes in physics. It is a very important and fascinating theme that I would like to entrust to future students of physics.

As a prophet of quantum information physics, I would like to record that all laws of the universe that humans can perceive will be written in the language of quantum information in the future. Those who engage in "science," which began based on the five senses, can only be beings with consciousness (including future AI that has acquired consciousness). And for those beings to understand the universe, they must necessarily interpose information. Since the world is governed by quantum mechanics, that "information" must strictly become quantum information.

(Photo credit: ICRR, The University of Tokyo)