Here is last night’s dream which is out of the blue and does not relate to the day to day of fence repair after another visit by the wild boars. Where this came from I have no clue.

I am walking through central London, Mayfair Piccadilly. It is a bright sunny day. I notice people converging on an ornate building in light coloured near white stone. It is a hybrid of Burlington House the old Royal Society of Chemistry where I spent many enjoyable hours in the library and of The Royal Society. People are gathering for some kind of scientific meeting. There is a mixture of academics and industry figures. I am not invited to this meeting. Through the doors and in the atrium I can see a reception desk which is being staffed by some women whom I used to know, a generation younger than me.

On a whim I walk in to say hi. They greet me and I ask if there is any chance of a cup of coffee. They get me one and warn me that it is not all that. I see that the conference is on “New Frontiers in Memory”. It has the theme of molecular architectures and memory and is of a think tank type of conjecture meeting. Rob walks in with one of the invited speakers who is a yank around 40. He is some kind of big cheese at the conference. Rob and I recognise each other after all these years. He introduces me to the speaker who is going to talk on protein molecular architectures and memory storage in the brain. He tells me that memory is all about entropy. You have to work against entropy to remember.

Rob invites me upstairs to look around. There are academic posters and a coffee service area. We queue and get a coffee and then stand at a pub style chest height table. In my mind’s eye I can see the way the cheese tries to address a memory array stored in a synthetic gel matrix. It is his way of modelling a wet memory, a mimic of biological memory which he seeks to incorporate into the next generation computers. I say to him that the encoding is of two types and that there are intrinsic and extrinsic entropies. The intrinsic entropy relates to where an individual amino acid is found along a protein chain and the pattern of its neighbour molecules. The extrinsic entropy is related to its local environment, degrees of folding and how space filling it is, how many gaps and voids are incorporated in the macroscopic protein structure. He says that he not previously thought about the molecular location entropy within a given protein strand. It might answer one of the questions he has. I can see in my mind’s eye an address matrix or tensor in mathematical form which defines coordinates for a given amino acid in a 3d protein amongst a wider gel matrix. The intrinsic lack of entropy is how a memory is stored. Memory works my comparing entropy. Anything not expected entropically is a memory. Low entropy is memory.

I say that the coffee is poor and that I hope they enjoy the meeting. I am off in search of a Starbucks, Costa or Caffè Nero.

The dream ends and I think WTF was that…