“I’m not saying everything is true.” Christophe Simon“All I’m saying is, it’s not a crazy thing to look for,” said , a physicist at the University of Calgary in Canada. He’s talking about the possibility that life has found ways to exploit quantum effects in many essential phenomena, from photosynthesis and the ability of birds to navigate to consciousness.
The idea has long been considered a bit far-fetched, given that such a fragile effect could occur. Must disappear quickly in a warm and humid cellular environment. Quantum nature tends to thrive in carefully isolated, very cold systems, rather than being part of a tepid body of water filled with other activity.
But that is starting to change, with preliminary evidence about quantum behavior in cellular machinery and suggestions that quantum biology may not follow the traditional rules governing the subatomic world, New questions are arising about the boundaries between the realm and the quantum realm.
“You could say, ‘Every molecule is quantum mechanical, so everything in biology is quantum mechanical,'” he says. Greg Scholes, a chemist at Princeton University. But what makes the idea of quantum biology really interesting, he says, is its potential to explain new macroscopic behaviors that cannot be predicted by classical laws.
Finding such behavior usually means looking for evidence of typical quantum properties such as superposition. In superposition, a system appears to exist in multiple states simultaneously before it loses so-called quantum coherence and “collapses” into one state or another. This is a process called decoherence.
Quantum effects…
Source: www.newscientist.com
