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I feel like "is biology quantum?" gates are kept in a needlessly stringent way.
They say that biological systems are too warm for quantum coherence to persist long enough to have meaningful effects. But if you have some molecule whose conformation is in a superposition of states--however briefly--and then the environment causes it to decohere and take on some fully determined non-quantum shape... that actual shape is still one of many possible ones into which it did not decohere. The environment has still hacked probability to trigger decoherence into this shape and not some other one, and evolution leans on this.
If you took a classical bag and filled it with classical locks and classical keys and just shook it around for a while, none of those keys would end up in the locks. But because of this quantum lubricant, ligands binding receptors do find themselves in the appropriate conformation to facilitate signal transduction, even at low concentrations. It's absolutely astounding that it works at all, and in a fully classical world it wouldn't for the same reason that the keys don't end up in the locks when you shake the bag for a while.
Biology is plenty quantum, and the people who are here to tell you it isn't are citing the abundance of interactions as evidence that it is not quantum, but it's through those many interactions that its quantum nature expresses itself.
Maybe it's not spooky-action-at-a-distance style quantum. Maybe it's not indeterminate enough for this theoretical purpose or that one. If you're trying to cram god in there, well it might not be quite spooky enough for that, but so much of what happens in the macroscopic world would not happen if the quantum world were not as strange as it is, and that's doubly true for biology.
There is some inaccuracy here I think. Decoherence means washing out of interference phenomenon, viz. you will observe no fringes in the double slit experiment with incoherent source pair (they switch so rapidly as to end up plain grey). What is erased or overwritten in tiny timescales cannot have a residual resultant or guiding gulley effect, or as you say, freezing the pattern/steric landscape in a preffered state repeatably. It would be tantamount to observing the fringe pattern with incoherent sources, for all timescales.
adjacent possibly related interesting fact , classically the temperature required to crosss the coulumb repulsion and fuse hydrogen in the sun is far higher than at the core of the sun,
what makes fusion viable at the core is there is a chance for nuclei tunneling through the barrier , that and the sheer size of the sun
Gamow worked this out in 1928; Atkinson and Houtermans applied it to stars a year later. Sun's power density is roughly a compost pile. Tunneling makes it possible, size makes up for how rare it is. Why ITER needs 150 million degrees: no sun-sized volume to be patient in.
> If you took a classical bag and filled it with classical locks and classical keys and just shook it around for a while, none of those keys would end up in the locks
I think you are vastly underestimating the number of collisions required to get an enzyme binding event. We did a back of the envelope calculation in grad school and it was something like >> 10^6 ~ 10^9.
And you can of course do macroscopic things like this:
Exactly, and the classical lock and key analogy ignores electromagnetic and hydrophobic/hydrophilic interactions, which we can fully model in classical molecular dynamics systems
Yeah, that number matches what I've seen. When we simulated ligand binding in GROMACS, a plain unbiased run almost never found the pocket in a reasonable time, so we ended up using metadynamics to push it. Most collisions are just wrong-orientation bounces. Nothing quantum needed to explain that, it's a needle-in-a-haystack search in classical phase space.
If you filled a classical bag with classical locks and classical keys and shook it for a very long time, you would indeed see a small number of keys in locks. There's a non-zero probability set of steps by which that can happen. Am I missing something obvious here?
At the molecular level biology is chemistry, and I think GP is implying that it's often the kind of chemistry that needs quantum mechanics to be explained properly. Now, I don't know how enzymes work, so I don't know if that's true. But I do know that they can do chemical conversions at room temperature where "naive" human chemistry would require temperatures incompatible with life (or pH levels, or pressure, or…).
So in biology the bag, lock and keys are shaped in such a way that you only have to shake for a short time to have multiple keys come out in locks, and in a particular order or pattern too. That's what makes the whole thing kinda magical. And I would not be surprised if quantum mechanics were involved in the chemistry in ways that classical mechanics cannot explain adequately.
EDIT: I started typing this yesterday evening and hadn't hit "send" before going to bed, I hadn't seen the rest of the discussion that had taken place since.
I feel like the author was either trying to write to a pretty lay audience or didn't understand the broad applicability of quantum mechanics. There is no threshold either where things are "classical" or "quantum". The systems that may be satisfactorily described by classical mechanics are just those in which the Planck constant may have a value of zero. While in modeling a system using quantum mechanics, it has a finite value.
Computational chemistry is based on different approximation methods for evaluating the interactions of a molecule with another. These methods work well, and as you can imagine form a large portion of biochemistry. Saying "Biology may not be quantum.." in the title seems pretty misleading at best.
Most of the interview quotes are researchers talking about any sort of long term coherence used in a biological organism. The article mentions this in brief but I didn't see a link. For a real cool example of biology pushing quantum limits check out the magnetic field "vision" of birds [0].
Something similar came up in Neil deGrasse Tyson's StarTalk yesterday. [0]
Neil deGrasse Tyson used the number 8 as an analogy to explain that mathematical similarities between two systems do not mean they share a physical connection -- they were discussing how both the universe and human brain can be described using fractal mathematics. He pointed out that you can count 8 planets in the solar system and 8 children in a room, but having the same count doesn't mean the children are planets.
The similarities say more about mathematics than it does about the universe and the human brain or planets and children.
Small nitpick: counting doesn't need a shared concept. Cardinality just means you can pair things off one-to-one, and you can count 3 planets plus 5 children as 8 things without any category. IIRC that's the whole point of numbers being abstract. Your broader point about the brain still stands though.
That it says something about the human brain seems to be about right. If you have 8 planets and 8 children it means you've classified certain things you've seen to be part of the same concept and you group them together.
Edit: FTA, "In photosynthesis, for example, organisms use specialized pigments and proteins to harvest light with nearly perfect quantum efficiency; they convert almost every incoming photon into useful chemical energy."
Edit: this is about standing waves and overtones: "In 2024, Scholes found a way to design complex networks of oscillators such that they produced emergent states — stable patterns of synchronized behavior, like a crowd that claps in time — that could be mathematically described as vectors in a Hilbert space."
I didn't even realize what I was looking at to begin with - I thought it was modern sculpture looking very interesting and organic, although the "installation" locations seemed almost impossible! :)
At some point we will need to get rid of the artificial boundaries of physics, chemistry and biology.
It made sense before when we could only look at things in their locality, but as we improve and see things at better and better resolution having a division will become meaningless.
They are different areas (and to some extent levels of abstraction). I think the distinction would remain relevant even if we had a perfect theory of everything and an exact mapping between every layer and concept.
The common link is math? The other day I saw in HN that do we need mathematicians in the future, as AI is solving every equations? But where is classical AI in terms of solving quantum equations?
Everything is waves it seems - fréquences and amplitudes are different, but cell oscillation, market, even the joys of music, and theme park rides - the things the brain needs and enjoys keep tickling it through wave action. Human behavior in groups and online as well. I’ve been doing experiments with https://www.wishlst.com and anything from color wavelengths to traffic patterns devolves to fourier-transform like math for multiple waves of people or light waves colliding.
I feel like a higher n-dimensional being observing time in a completely different way through those images, as if I could touch the bird at any of those points if I wanted.
So wearying to keep seeing people talk about biology, including the human brain, as though it were guided by Newtonian physics. No. All of the matter and energy in the universe is understood via quantum mechanics. Chemistry would make zero sense without it. "Biology might not be quantum" is therefore just ignorant at best.
Really the question is, when will we discover a biological phenomena that can’t be explained by Newtonian physics, including the earlier “wrong” chemistry models?
I disagree. Nobody in the article says biology is Newtonian. The claim is about quantum-like math, probability models that borrow the formalism with no quantum hardware underneath. "Everything is quantum underneath" is true, but it doesn't explain why interference terms fit decision data better. Different claim entirely.
The real question is whether biology exploits a subset of special quantum phenomena (entanglement, coherence, superposition). Just about everybody in the field acknowledges that biology, being made of chemistry and physics, is "quantum", but in a "boring" way (just the energy calculations), but the bar to convincingly demonstrate exploitation of special phenomena is much higher.
That's fair. Quantum is an extremely fragile state - any perturbance will collapse the field state into an observed classical physics value. This is why complex machinery and near absolute zero temperatures are required to maintain it. I guess 'quantumlike' just felt like an affront to the science of it all.
I feel there is enough happening in the brain that we need to understand it further beyond classical physics can allow. I suspect especially that a mother and child share a strong lifelong subspace bond, whereby they can sense one another's state, in a way that logic or physics cannot explain. This sensing bond probably exists with others too but at an exponentially weaker level. I am not asserting anything, only begging inquiry.
you could scientifically test this easily put n mothers and children in adjacent rooms and smack half the kids and measure the mothers opinion of the childs state. id wager no statistically difference
1. The mothers cannot be told in advance anything about what will happen to their children, otherwise they will trigger false positives.
2. The objective is not merely to study the population-level rate, but also to engage in CIA-style experimentation whereby the experimenters try to find the few individuals that reproducibly have a substantially higher rate than of the population.
Has anyone shown these quantumlike models predict something a classical model with hidden state and context-dependence wouldn't? Order effects in surveys fit interference terms, sure, but add enough free parameters and anything fits. What's the held-out data where the quantum version wins with fewer parameters?
They say that biological systems are too warm for quantum coherence to persist long enough to have meaningful effects. But if you have some molecule whose conformation is in a superposition of states--however briefly--and then the environment causes it to decohere and take on some fully determined non-quantum shape... that actual shape is still one of many possible ones into which it did not decohere. The environment has still hacked probability to trigger decoherence into this shape and not some other one, and evolution leans on this.
If you took a classical bag and filled it with classical locks and classical keys and just shook it around for a while, none of those keys would end up in the locks. But because of this quantum lubricant, ligands binding receptors do find themselves in the appropriate conformation to facilitate signal transduction, even at low concentrations. It's absolutely astounding that it works at all, and in a fully classical world it wouldn't for the same reason that the keys don't end up in the locks when you shake the bag for a while.
Biology is plenty quantum, and the people who are here to tell you it isn't are citing the abundance of interactions as evidence that it is not quantum, but it's through those many interactions that its quantum nature expresses itself.
Maybe it's not spooky-action-at-a-distance style quantum. Maybe it's not indeterminate enough for this theoretical purpose or that one. If you're trying to cram god in there, well it might not be quite spooky enough for that, but so much of what happens in the macroscopic world would not happen if the quantum world were not as strange as it is, and that's doubly true for biology.