The field of Quantum Biology is just beginning to bloom so I won't be covering all the details and that'll make for a pretty short chapter. Tho a new field of science, it is expanding quite rapidly and if you're on the ball you can likely get into brand new college classes to get into the field on the ground floor very soon. Here's an article from Nature, an international weekly science journal, entitled "Physics of life: The dawn of quantum biology."
"On the face of it, quantum effects and living organisms seem to occupy utterly different realms. The former are usually observed only on the nanometre scale, surrounded by hard vacuum, ultra-low temperatures and a tightly controlled laboratory environment. The latter inhabit a macroscopic world that is warm, messy and anything but controlled. A quantum phenomenon such as 'coherence', in which the wave patterns of every part of a system stay in step, wouldn't last a microsecond in the tumultuous realm of the cell.
Or so everyone thought. But discoveries in recent years suggest that nature knows a few tricks that physicists don't: coherent quantum processes may well be ubiquitous in the natural world."
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110615/full/474272a.html
Or so everyone thought. But discoveries in recent years suggest that nature knows a few tricks that physicists don't: coherent quantum processes may well be ubiquitous in the natural world."
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110615/full/474272a.html
The IAS, or Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Surrey just held a workshop in 2012. It reads:
"Evidence has recently emerged that plants use a form of quantum computing to calculate how best to direct energy through their photosynthetic apparatus. Scientists have discovered that birds, insects and other animals appear to use entanglement (what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”) to detect the earth’s magnetic field. And there is solid evidence that enzymes, those metabolic workhorses that drive much of the action in our cells, use the process known as quantum tunneling to accelerate chemical reactions. We may even use quantum mechanics to smell! Centres of quantum theoreticians and experimentalists on both sides of the Atlantic are struggling to understand how fragile quantum mechanical phenomena previously thought to be confined to highly rarefied laboratory systems at temperatures close to absolute zero, manage to survive in the wet, warm biological world."
http://www.ias.surrey.ac.uk/workshops/quantumbiology/
http://www.ias.surrey.ac.uk/workshops/quantumbiology/
Since we won't be covering the details all we have to remember is that quantum processes do occur outside the quantum realm and that there is no doubt that Quantum Physics plays a role in biology. If you'd like to learn a little more about Quantum Biology, here's a 95 minute long panel discussion from the World Science Festival entitled "Quantum Biology and the Hidden Nature of Nature"
Additional Links:
So Quantum Physics is obviously here to stay, and we can see it's real world applications both in technology and in the biology of animals, but what about us? Can quantum mechanics affect our bodies too? Again, the answer is yes.
- http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/is_the_brain_a_quantum_device
- http://www.theswartzfoundation.org/papers/caltech/koch-hepp-07-final.pdf
- http://qubit-ulm.com/quantum-effects-in-biology/
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgQVZju1ZM
- http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729022.500-photosynthesis-the-emergence-of-quantum-biology.html
So Quantum Physics is obviously here to stay, and we can see it's real world applications both in technology and in the biology of animals, but what about us? Can quantum mechanics affect our bodies too? Again, the answer is yes.