"Sentience" might not be as you once thought. In today’s
quantum world, first and foremost, we have to ask ourselves
what it means to be self-aware." And sapience no longer is the correct question.
Once upon a time, there was an inertial system and a
reference system...
See
Zarate, Oscar, Introducing Quantum Theory: A
Graphic Guide to Science's Most
Puzzling Discovery, Totem Books (2003)
ISBN-13: 978-1840468502.; Quantum mechanics
could date back to the 19th century transmission
of cathode rays by Michael Faraday, discovery of
the black body radiation by Gustav Kirchhoff,
and suggestion by Ludwig Boltzmann that energy
states of physical systems can be
discrete. In the early 20th Century
scientists like Max Planck formulated hypotheses
that energy is both radiated and absorbed in
discrete "quanta", or "energy elements" and in
1905 Albert Einstein interpreted Planck's
quantum hypothesis realistically and used it to
explain the photoelectric effect, in which
shining light on certain materials can eject
electrons from the material; The 1927 Solvay
Conference in Brussels is often considered the
pivotal event establishing the foundations of
quantum mechanics by Niels Bohr, Werner
Heisenberg, Max Planck, Louis de Broglie, Albert
Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, John von
Neumann, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, David
Hilbert, and others.
