MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (AP) -- The Vermont rock band Phish
provided the first replication of an important atomic physics
experiment at a concert on Thursday night at Shoreline Amphitheater.
The brain of a member of the audience went into a quantum physical
state known as superfluidity and generated audible vibrations, a
phenomenon that has long been predicted but only observed recently
in a laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley.
Audience member Mark Young, 36, was enjoying the concert with about
about 20,000 other "phans" when his brain went superfluid due to
strange improvising by the band during the jam segment of the song
Runaway Jim. At that point, a single wave function described each
hemisphere of Young's brain, resulting in a psychological state called
"zero consciousness", a term coined by Marin County musician Martin
Fierro. However, at the corpus callosum which interconnects the two
sides of the brain, individual neurons were "confused" about which side
they belonged to. The quantum state of these confused neurons switched
between the two wave functions resulting in oscillations with an audible
frequency. A disturbance broke out when tapers got angry because they
thought that Young was ignoring their requests to stop humming.
Young's wife, who initially thought his behavior was due to
consuming "too much of the dank" in the parking lot before the
show, escorted him to a first aid tent. Medical personnel at Shoreline
were alarmed by the audible vibrations and Young was rushed to Stanford
University where an MRI scan was performed and the cause of the
vibration discovered. Young, a research psychologist from San Francisco,
had mixed feelings about making this particular contribution to science,
"I'm jazzed to be in on such a cool physics experiment but I'm bummed
that I missed the Mike's>Hydrogen>Weekapaug". Young was not surprised
that Phish's performance had such a drastic effect upon him, "The jam
was sick. I think that I might have gone partly superfluid during the
YEM too. I was pretty confused during the setbreak."