The Welch Conference

I felt that the Welch Conference in October was one of the best I have been to. It was titled Physical Biology – From Atoms to Cells, and it covered many topics including folding, novel amino acids, membranes, and quantum physics. The key note speakers were the Welch awardees, Noel Hush and William Miller. However the conference also featured many Noel Prize winners.

The lecture of William Miller on quantum mechanics and molecular simulation was very fascinating to me because I had just finished a semester of TAing in a class of biophysics. The notion of coherence as a structural feature in the eigen space representation helped to extend my limited perceptions. However the general approach of converting a two point boundary problem to an initial value problem using a closed integral was familiar. How he cast the problem as a diatic needs further investigation, as my use of diatics and tensor mathematics was limited to structures (beam theory). Need to lookup Wigner Functions.