Salvatore Santoli

INT - International Nanobiological Testbed Ltd., R&D Dept.

After giving a brief account of the present state-of-the-art in the field of biomimetics based on novel materials, which are mainly considered for the building of smart systems capable of autonomous monitoring of the environment, of self-healing and in general of mimicking the intelligent behavior of living systems, it is argued that nanostructuring of any macroscopic component, device or system is a necessary condition to mimick, to attain metaphors closer to reality, biological intelligence. Considerations based on thermodynamics, theoretical physics and computer science show that this quality cannot be mimicked through macroscopic materials and Artificial Intelligence techniques if a close approximation to biosystem behavior is required, for instance the autonomous active control of the whole system. Information processing in living matter occurs basicly under far-from-equilibrium conditions, i.e. under general quantum decoherence conditions, while no distinction can be made between structure and function; moreover, stability of the biomimetic processes asks for not hard-wired, flexible components to overcome the degrading action of thermal noise. The hierarchical system informational properties of any intelligent biomimetic automaton, though based on nanoscale dissipative chaotic dynamics which can realize the structure-function solidarity, are shown to allow the organization of nanostructured systems working on the principles of Quantum Holography, which requires coherence conditions. It is argued that such conditions are carried into effect as a result of the symmetry properties inherent in information processing through Quantum Holography itself. This technique is shown to be essentially a Lie group theoretical construct as is realized by the Weyl-Heisenberg group that relates to the quantum commutation relations of Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Holography, as a purely geometric method independent of energy makes it possible to overcome the "semantic barrier" or barrier of meaning that is due to energy gaps throughout the energetic strata of the whole hierarchy, so that the stretching of information from the quantum microscopic level up to the macroscopic level by crossing the nanoscale level, can be realized. The Weyl-Heisenberg group is shown to act as the non-commutative group of symmetries to analyze and synthesize the convolution structure of the wavelets originating from a mother wavelet in the case of phase coherence under the action of the Fourier transform (Huyghens' principle), and it implements the symmetries mentioned above and concerning quantum level adaptive resonance self-organization on the basis of phase conjugation for any proper geometric scale, from the microphysical, i.e. the quantum physical scale to the macrophysical scale. All that is valid not only for photonic systems, but also for waves of any kind. Such results from noncommutative geometry are shown to be connected with a Keplerian geometric (i.e. energy-independent) procedure to find the laws for planetary motions without any knowledge of gravitation laws, and are applied to outlining the ways to design nanostructured biomimetic small robots realizing the long sought-after property of Active Shape Control for flying/swimming under conditions of very low Reynolds number, on the basis of some recent experimental studies concerning air- and hydro-flow around the wings and the swimming members respectively of small insects and fishes. It is stressed that noncommutative geometry would play a remarkable role not only in biomimicry technologies, but also in a quantum theoretical approach to the technology and engineering of nanostructured macroscopic hierarchical systems to explore connections between the nano- and the microphysical level, e.g. with possible extension to living structures.