Group #3: Zubin Tiku, Mark Domino, Litza Stark
"Quantum Bees" (from Discover Magazine, November 1997)
It has long been established that bees communicate the location of food sources through a symbolic waggle dance. Many entomologists have interpreted this dance as a bee language. The shape of the dance looks vaguely like a clamshell, and the angle between the two halves is directly related to the angle triangulating the sun, the beehive, and the food source. While scientists have known about this behavior for decades, there was no explanation as to how such simple creatures could perceive such sophisticated sensory data and produce such a complex representational. Recently, Barbara Shipman, a mathematician with an interest in bees, noticed a similarity between the bee dance and a representation of the esoteric flag manifold shape from six-dimensional math. Upon further study, she found that the flag manifold could represent every permutation of the bee dance. She asserts that there may be a connection between the two structures, and has proposed that the link between them is quantum mechanics, since the flag manifold can also describe the behavior of quarks. It has already been determined that bees can be affected by magnetic fields, and Shipman speculates that this mechanism may somehow be nvolved in sensing quantum fields.
What problems does this raise for cognitive science?