Quantum Physics is a subject that is often discarded by everyday people as too esoteric or too new-agey (depending on which kind of QM you read about) to be useful in everyday life. We have all been introduced to QM as “the science of stuff too small to really matter to everyday life.” But recent developments in biological science have revealed that life itself puts powerful quantum mechanical principles to use as an everyday part of its function. “Quantum Biology” is one of the forefronts of modern science.
Quantum Physics in Bird Navigation
We’ve known for decades that many species of birds migrate each year, most famously from north to south as the temperature drops in the temperate zones. But how they navigate during those migrations has always been a mystery. The magnetic field the Earth produces is terribly weak compared to the other forces that act on an animal’s body. Furthermore, biologists knew from studies that birds’ compasses are light-dependent, and that they detect magnetic fields relative to the surface of the planet, not the poles.
It wasn’t until the rule of quantum entanglement developed that we began to develop a theory of how bird compasses worked. Without delving too far into the science, the theory is that bird’s eyes contain a protein that itself contains millions of entangled electrons. When light enters the bird’s eye, it knocks some of those entangled electrons loose, but leaves others attached to the protein molecules.
The “loose” electrons are much more dramatically affected by the Earth’s magnetic field than the bound ones are, but the entanglement means the bound electrons move the same way. The subsequent “wiggling” of the protein that the bound electrons are attached to can be perceived by the bird’s retina and translated by its brain into a “picture” of the magnetic field it’s flying through.
Quantum Physics in Photosynthesis
Plants, it seems, use quantum mechanics for one of the most important aspects of life on Earth: turning sunlight into the power that life runs on. The biggest mystery of photosynthesis for as long as we’ve understood it is “how is photosynthesis so efficient?” Our best machines achieve efficiencies of upwards of 30% — photosynthetic transfer of energy is upwards of 99% efficient. There are so many directions a photon could travel once it gets captured by a molecule of chlorophyll that science had no idea how such a high proportion of photons made it to the “reaction center” where they were used in building new molecules.
The answer turns out to be quantum coherence, the ability of a quantum particle to act like a wave until something “decoheres” it. The theory is that photons enter plant cells, are captured by chlorophyll, and rather than traveling in a particle-like manner, they travel as waves, and the “reaction center” has the ability to decohere those waves back into particle (photon) form.
Quantum Physics In Your Digestion
Enzymes are catalysts — chemicals that trigger other chemical creations. But for decades, scientists have been unable to determine how enzymes can speed up reactions so much: up to a trillion times faster than they would naturally occur. Recent research has shown that enzymes may be a trigger of quantum coherence — as above — using the “wave side” of the wave-particle quality to cause electrons and even protons to simply “teleport” from one atom to another, bypassing the need for time, heat, and all of the other factors that enable or speed up classical chemical reactions.
Quantum Physics In Your Sense of Self
Finally, worthy of a mention in passing is the theory being debated right now by many scientists: that quantum mechanics are fundamental to our consciousness. For centuries, humans have proposed “second processing systems” in the brain or body that run parallel to our normal neuron firings, and that these overlapping systems are what give rise to our ability to mentally separate ourselves from our circumstances — what we call “being conscious.”
Recent evidence has come up that the cytokine in the brain — what we used to think of as the “brain’s skeleton,” holding it all together — is in fact a massive quantum processor. Laced with what the scientists call “microtubules” that vibrate at incredible speeds, the cytokine system appears to be operating on the quantum level as a “trinary” computer — able to hold values of ‘on,’ ‘off,’ and the quantum superposition of being both on and off at the same time.
What exactly this would enable our “secondary processing system” to accomplish is currently being explored — but the results, if we find them, are bound to change a lot of our fundamental assumptions about what we, as human beings, are capable of.
Featured image courtesy of Cristóbal Alvarado Minic via Flickr. Shared using a Creative Commons license.
