An interesting discussion cropped up recently today, based on a Discover Magazine article from 1997.  This article was resurrected on Metafilter, and a number of people pointed out that it also informs a very interesting sub-set of conversations, where "paranoid conspiracy theory" overlaps with "quantum mechanics enthusiasts."

When a honeybee is out foraging, she isn't just looking for pollen.  She is looking for big sources of pollen that she can share with her hive-mates.  When she finds it, she flies straight back to the hive and tells them how to find it.

Imagine yourself a bee.  You somehow have an exact understanding of the location of the pollen.  You do not have hands, or GPS, or Google Maps, or even access to a pen and the back of a telephone bill.  How would you communicate the pollen's location to your sisters?

The bees' answer to this question is, "through the power of interpretive dance."

This is called the "waggle dance."  The bee communicates the distance, quality, and direction of the source through her body position and the movements of the dance.  This is an extremely complicated and precise form of communication, with a language and syntax that scientists have spent years compiling and describing.

One interesting characteristic of this dance is that the bee waggles for things that are far away.  But when the source is moved closer, past a certain point the waggle turns into a circle.  This is a little odd, but most scientists had just chalked it up to "oh well it's just bees."

Until mathematician and quantum physicist Barbara Shipman, a researcher at the University of Rochester, noticed that the shape of the bee's dance can be explained by something called the Flag Manifold.

I don't pretend to understand the intricacies of the Flag Manifold.  It's a six-dimensional shape, so you're not really, you know, SUPPOSED to understand it.  (A line is a one-dimensional shape.  A square is a two-dimensional shape.  A cube is a three-dimensional shape.  A Flag Manifold is a six-dimensional shape.)

Furthermore, the Flag Manifold is used by many physicists to explain the behavior of quarks, which are semi-imaginary particles that serve as building blocks for hadrons, some of which themselves serve as building blocks for protons and neutrons.  In other words, quarks are the particles that the particles of particles are made of.  The tiniest crumbs of the universe, if you will.

At this point, Barbara Shipman made a leap that even she openly acknowledged was fanciful, and suggested that perhaps bees are engaged with the quantum physics of the universe.  

This is a lovely idea, and one that deserves to be explored in more depth. But it is almost certainly wrong.  Here's the thing: I sometimes turn in a circle.  Airplanes also sometimes fly in circles.  But that doesn't make me an airplane.

The bee dance is interesting and elaborate enough all on its own, without this silly window dressing of quantum physics.  The fact that the bees may be pointing to a spot on the Flag Manifold only points out that quantum physics really is the underpinning of our existence.  It doesn't mean that the bees are engaged with quarks in any more meaningful fashion.

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user jasonEscapist