Cubitt and his collaborators focused on calculating the ‘spectral gap’: the gap between the lowest energy level that electrons can occupy in a material, and the next one up.
My comment: I hesitate to suggest that the problem of the spectral [energy] gap must be placed into the context of what is known about the speed of light on contact with water and how the anti-entropic energy of the sun is linked from quantum unentanglement to the de novo creation of nucleic acids. From the creation of nucleic acids the speed of light can subsequently be linked to all RNA-mediated cell type differentiation in the context of Schrodinger’s, Sheldrake’s, Stuart Kauffman’s, Luca Turin’s, Anna Di Cosmo‘s and my claims about how physics and chemistry must be linked to the conserved molecular mechanisms of RNA-mediated cell type differentiation in all living genera.
Excerpt 2)
Million-dollar question
Cubitt says that the team ultimately wants to study a related problem in particle physics called the Yang–Mills mass-gap problem, which the Clay Mathematics Institute in Peterborough, New Hampshire, has named one of its Millennium Prize Problems. The institute is offering $1 million to anyone who is able to solve it.
My comment: If it’s worth a million dollars, perhaps a theoretical physicist will be interested in collaboration to show others that the solution to the problem in particle physics is may be right under their nose. If ever I find a physicist who does not insist on linking everything to emergence and evolution, I would be interested in splitting the prize money. But first, the physicist would need to learn how to communicate in terms that can be linked to biologically-based cause and effect.
See for comparison: Was ribosome the first self-replicator?
Excerpt:
…does it make sense to talk about dark variants of cell and cell membrane? Can one tell whether it was pro-cell or bio-molecules that emerged first? It seems that all these structures could have emerged simultaneously. What emerged was dark matter and its emergence involved the emergence of all the others. Hens and eggs emerged simultaneously.
My comment: As a reminder of how pervasive this pseudoscientific nonsense about emergence has become, see: MicroRNA mechanisms of action: what have we learned from mice?
Conclusion:
We speculate that miRNAs emerged during evolution to increase the complexity of gene regulation, thereby contributing to the diversity of organisms.