I don't know anyone who assumes that. And it's completely irrelevant. You scatter off phonons (lattice vibrations) whether they're calculated anharmonically or harmonically. Straw man.
Such weak dependence of potential energy on the distance can be considered as indication of long-range interaction due to the expressed cooperative properties of water as associative liquid. The difference between water and ice points, that the role of distant Van der Waals interactions, stabilizing primary effectons (mesoscopic molecular Bose condensate), is increasing with dimensions of these coherent clusters as a result of temperature decreasing and liquid > solid phase transition. It is a strong evidence that oscillations of molecules in water and ice are strongly anharmonic and the condensed matter can not be considered as a classical system, following condition (1.1) and (1.6).
This is a piece of jargon-laced gobbledegook. van der Waals interactions have an inverse sixth power dependence on distance. 'Distant van der Waals interactions' is a contradiction in terms. My colleague, Xiaocheng Zeng has done explicit quantum calculations on water clusters of 120 molecules, and is fitting them with an empirical force field to allow stat. mechanical modeling. Long range cooperative interactions of the sort Kaivarainen's discussing (more like waffling on about) there don't enter the picture. The is a degree of cooperativity in hydrogen bonding, but it's still only a three-body problem. Water has a dielectric constant of around 80, so it screens long-range electrostatic interactions more effectively than almost anything.
There's a long way from discussing whether water can be treated as a classical system (for most purposes it probably can), and whether an ensemble of quantum of classical or quantum particles, moving thermally at 300 K, can sustain Bose condensation. There is no experimental evidence for such condensation. Bose-Einstein condensation between heavy particles has only recently been demonstrated, at 0.000001 K. I suppose you could argue superfluid helium 4 is Bose condensed, but that's the most weakly interacting atom known, at 1/150 of room temperature. So we're supposed to believe it happens at an absolute temperature 300 million times higher, in the absence of experimental evidence or any decent theory? This is like hypothesising that molecules, which are correlated quantum systems that persist up to a couple of thousand kelvin, perhaps, could exist in the center of the sun.
Have you ever watched Brownian moton of a pollen grain? Pollen in water, bombarded by water molecules many trillions of times smaller than itself, is buffeted around randomly like a beachball in a stormy ocean. So put two beachballs in the ocean; will their air spaces delicately resonate with each other?
I looked for information on the net by "Xiaocheng Zhang" and only found nuclear reactor and finance information. Is this name one that inverts to " Zhang Xiaocheng?" There is much more available on that construction.
Alex Kaivarainen is seen as a kook by a number of people precisely because he makes certain claims concerning consciousness and quantum mechanics. I found it quite interesting that Democratic Underground is among the debunkers (LOL!)
Evidently, you put Penrose, Hameroff and Kaivarainen in the same bucket. I respectfully disagree. Hameroff’s work Cytoplasmic Gel States and Ordered Water: Possible Roles in Biological Quantum Coherence fits nicely with Kaivarainen:
Herbert Frohlich, an early contributor to the understanding of superconductivity, also predicted quantum coherence in living cells (based on earlier work by Oliver Penrose and Lars Onsager [23]) Frohlich [24-26] theorized that sets of protein dipoles in a common electromagnetic field (e.g. proteins within a polarized membrane, subunits within an electret polymer like microtubules) undergo coherent conformational excitations if energy is supplied. Frohlich postulated that biochemical and thermal energy from the surrounding "heat bath" provides such energy. Cooperative, organized processes leading to coherent excitations emerged, according to Frohlich, because of structural coherence of hydrophobic dipoles in a common voltage gradient.
Coherent excitation frequencies on the order of 109 to 1011 Hz (identical to the time domain for functional protein conformational changes, and in the microwave or gigaHz spectral region) were deduced by Fr hlich who termed them acousto-conformational transitions, or coherent (pumped) phonons. Such coherent states are termed Bose-Einstein condensates in quantum physics and have been suggested by Marshall [27] to provide macroscopic quantum states which support the unitary binding of consciousness. Experimental evidence for Frohlich-like coherent excitations in biological systems includes observation of gigaHz-range phonons in proteins [28], sharp-resonant non-thermal effects of microwave irradiation on living cells [29], gigaHz induced activation of microtubule pinocytosis in rat brain [30], and laser Raman spectroscopy detection of Frohlich frequency energy [31-32]. Coherent Frohlich excitations in cytoskeletal microtubules have been suggested to mediate information processing [5,7,9]. Related work has focused on water at the surfaces of quantum coherent biostructures. In the context of quantum field theory, an historical line of theoretical proposals [33-35] have examined interactions between the electric dipole field of water and the quantized electromagnetic field of the (cytoskeletal) biostructure.
In quantum field theory, fundamental fields fill the universe. Constituents of matter (electrons, protons, neutrons) are seen as the energy quanta of the matter field, which interacts with the quantum electromagnetic field by exchanging, creating and annihilating photons. ("Our world is made of matter and light" - [35]) The significant point for biology and neuroscience is that the allowed energy states ("eigenstates") of a quantum field are mutually correlated with other energy eigenstates. A quantum field is thus coherent, unitary, and avoids thermal disorder. Such properties characterize life, and consciousness. Jibu and Yasue [35] have specified "Quantum Brain Dynamics" (QBD) in which the quantized electromagnetic field interacts with the rotational field of water molecule dipoles within neural dendrites and glia. Lowest energy eigenstates ("ground," or "vacuum" states) of the water dipole field are memory states in QBD. The dynamic exchange - creation and annihilation of quasi-particles ("corticons") between the two fields - is consciousness, in the Jibu/Yasue view, and is proposed to interface to cytoskeletal dynamics which in turn interface with dendritic and neural network levels of brain function.
Here we consider three proposals in which ordered water may play a role in biological quantum coherence essential for living systems and consciousness: 1) quantum optical coherence in microtubule inner cores ("super-radiance" and "self-induced transparency"); 2) cellular "vision"; 3) isolation of microtubules from environmental decoherence.
14.6 An interesting possibility has come my way, which may conceivably have relevance to the question of how quantum coherence might get conveyed between one neuron and another (a question raised by Klein). As noted in Shadows, Figs. 7.11, 7.12 on pp. 365, 366, there are some particular molecules (clathrins) that inhabit synaptic boutons, which have the highly symmetrical structure of a truncated icosahedron (like a modern soccer ball). These clathrin molecules have importance in the release of neurotransmitter chemicals at synapses (whereby the nerve signals are transmitted from neuron to neuron). Although I do not have specific suggestions to make here, I am struck by the extraordinary symmetry of these molecules. It has been brought to my attention (by Roy Douglas, cf. Douglas and Rutherford 1995) that, according to the Jahn-Teller effect, such highly symmetrical molecules would have a large energy gap between the lowest quantum energy level and the next. This lowest level would be highly degenerate, and there would be interesting quantum-mechanical effects when this degeneracy is broken.
14.7 Energy gaps and symmetry breaking, of this general nature, are central to the understanding of superconductivity - and superconductivity is one of the few clear phenomena in which large-scale quantum coherence takes place. Known observationally since 1911, and explained quantum-mechanically in 1957, superconductivity had been thought originally to be an exclusively very low-temperature phenomenon, occurring only at a few degrees above absolute zero. It is now known to occur at much higher temperatures of -158 degrees Celsius, or perhaps even -23 degrees (although this is not properly explained). It does not seem to be out of the question that there might be similar effects at the somewhat higher temperatures of microtubules. Perhaps there are understandings to be obtained about the behaviour of microtubules from the experimental insights gained from such high-temperature superconductors.
I’ve just started looking through this page of quantum links, but thought other Freepers might like a heads up also.