Honeybees are found to interact with Quantum fields

It also knocks me flat to contemplate the ideas this intriguing article generates. It does good to be staggered by something new once in a while: it keeps complacency at bay.

Made me laugh:

The flag manifold, she notes, in addition to providing mathematicians with pure joy, also happens to be useful to physicists (...)

This connection to QFT is almost surely nonsense. The flag manifold in question comes from matrix groups; basically, consider some subset of 3x3 matrices which satisfy a certain property. I.e., certain types of transformations of a 3d space. While the space of 3x3 matrices has 3x3=9 dimensions, subsets can have fewer dimensions (in this case, 6).

The two-dimensional projections she discovered are functions of the 6 dimensional matrices. So here is the occams razor explanation for what is happening. Inside the bee's head is an ODE (ordinary differential equation) solver, basically an analog computer. Just think of the ODE solver as a complicated timer, but with output depending on both time and some hidden variable. These are common objects in biology, and don't require many neurons.

The output of the ODE solver is wired to some neurons which reduce 6 variables to 2, according to the formula she discovered.

This is a fantastic discovery, a triumph of applied math. But the connection to QFT is almost surely coincidence: QFT uses symmetries of matrix groups over 3 dimensions, and the bee (which lives in 3 dimensions) also does. This phenomenon is called universality. Certain objects repeat across diverse areas simply because it is the only logical way (or the most common logical way) that things could happen.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=391396

Not for the purposes of this article. It might be computationally difficult to predict the progress of a dance as t -> infinity (to answer this question, I'd need to know more about flag manifolds), but it's unlikely that bees solve that problem.