WAVES OF TRANSPARENCY (PART III)

Sreekumar K

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"In that case, we should first talk about ants, yes ants." 

Jean paused for a while and fished out his mobile. He turned on an app and left it on their table, close to the water jug. His phone had voice incinerator. What they discuss would be heard only by them and no one could record it either.

He continued. 

"Even if we put together all the neurons of all the ants on an anthill, its mass will come to only a small fraction of the human brain. But the complex anthill structured with amazing facilities that they build will put us to shame. From air-conditioned parlours to indoor farming, nothing is wanting on an anthill. Such a complex thought cannot be stored in the brain of a single ant. What it has is a little more than a neuron ganglia. But the anthill is a reality. The reason is that they have got total connectivity."

"You mean, like the Internet?" said Georges.

Jean laughed out loud.

"You don't have to go that far. Even our own brain is fragmented and I don't mean we are schizophreniacs or something. None of the hundred billions of neurons in our brain is connected with another. What is technically called the synaptic gap separates them from one another and this gap is filled with several types of neurotransmitters. Its function is the same as the pheromones produced by ants." 

"Hey you lost me a minute ago," cried Yufi

"I can explain that. The neurotransmitters, dopamine and oxytocin for example, connect our neurons and let the electrical impulses pass through the gaps between the neurons, I mean across the synaptic gap. In fact, alcohol can fill the very same gap with fat and insulate them, one reason why your impulses reflections slow down when you are drunk. Now, Jean just said that we can consider the ant brains on an anthill as a single brain chopped into thousands and each ant head fitted with a piece. Pheromones produced by ants when they come closer functions as a connecter between them. The fragmentation is only a metaphor and the rest are similes," Georges smiled when he was done.

He looked at Yuphi who was still struggling to understand it and said, "The ants do give out some molecules of pheromones when they meet and that is how they communicate."

"Yes, exactly. Or at least that is what we thought till now. We thought it is a crude language. New data and some keen observation by Noam Chomsky made us think differently. Not forgetting Dr. V S Ramachandran here. Today,  this is considered more as a means of communication and not as a language."  

 "O, God! It seems like the ants enjoyed super connectivity even before the humans appeared on the face of the earth! There is a Swahili tale about ants learning addition and multiplication. But this is even stranger," said Yufi who never lost a chance to jeer at science and technology. 

"The next thing we have to talk about it the stars and their light. We think the stars do light up the whole universe, but that is not true. There are a good number of them burning bright, but most of the universe is still in darkness. The lit-up sky that we see is, in cosmological scales, actually just a lit-up neighbourhood in the wild. However, there is another light that engulfs the whole of the universe but we don't have eyes to see it," saying this Jean looked around to get some response from his attentive listeners.

"Do you mean love?" asked Yufi rather hesitantly.

"We are discussing science here, not fairy tales, sir." 

There was a tinge of no so well hidden irritation when Jean said that. It was no more a secret that he had broken up with Patricia. Still, he didn't want anyone to hint at that even subtly. 

If he had not cut in like that neither Georges nor Yufi would have glanced at Patricia. Both of them had the same question rising up in their minds. What would have caused their break up?

"It was way back in 1905 that a French man called Henry Poincare, known as the last polymath, hinted at the existence of such a phenomenon. Einstein too, in his own poetic way, suggested the same in 1916 when he found that his general theory of relativity was not getting anywhere. It was two noble prize winners who exposed this hide and seek game in 1933. But since they were not able to provide valid proofs their ideas too bogged down. They didn't get Nobel prize for that but for their discovery of Hall-Taylor Binary Pulsar

"Then began the greatest hunt in the history of science. All kinds of traps were set, each way too better than the previous but the evidence remained more and more elusive than ever. Till GEO-600 was put up in Hanover in 1995 there was no real hope at all. GEO-600 altered history. Thus 22 years ago we had a catch. 

George could not suppress a yawn.

"What did they catch?" Yufi who was listening to all that as if it was an African fairy tale could not suppress his curiosity.