Biology Might Not Be Quantum, but Its Math Is Quantumlike
Scientists have a history of trying — and failing — to link biology and quantum mechanics. The real connection between them may be in the math. The post Biology Might Not Be Quantum, but Its Math Is Quantumlike first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Two decades ago, scientists believed they were on the brink of understanding biology through a quantum lens. Life occurs across an astronomical range of scales, from earth-shrouded biospheres to cell-building biomolecules. Yet, even at its most microscopic level, biology doesn't dip into the quantum realm, where particles act like waves, entangle with one another, and exist in multiple states simultaneously.
However, researchers in quantum biology are exploring ways organisms might harness quantum properties within life's relevant domains of time, space, and temperature. For instance, photosynthetic organisms employ specialized pigments and proteins to capture light nearly perfectly, converting almost every absorbed photon into useful chemical energy.
In 2007, new evidence suggested that life might accomplish this feat by exploiting a quantum effect called coherence. This finding reignited the controversial notion that, despite the warm, wet, and decidedly classical nature of life, cells could maintain and even capitalize on fragile quantum states. Greg Scholes, a chemist at Princeton University, was initially excited by the discovery.
He and his team followed up with experiments on photosynthesizing proteins and pigments, arriving at similar conclusions. However, Scholes is now skeptical that quantum effects are involved in life. Instead, he believes that nature might be imitating quantum effects rather than employing them directly. In recent papers, Scholes and his team demonstrated that complex networks of classical objects can mimic the mathematics of quantum objects, though not the quantum phenomena themselves.
These states are "quantumlike," emerging from the collective behavior of many interacting, oscillating parts. Markus Müller, a physicist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna, noted that Scholes has demonstrated how quantumlike behavior can arise from relatively unremarkable complex networks prevalent in nature.
"Classical systems can mimic some of the key features of quantum information," said Sabre Kais, a quantum chemist working on quantum computing algorithms at North Carolina State University. The allure of casting life's enigmas as quantum phenomena has a long history, dating back to Niels Bohr's 1929 lecture where he suggested quantum mechanics might be crucial in understanding the position of living organisms within the world.
Bohr's contemporary, Pascual Jordan, devoted decades to writing on Quantenbiologie, or quantum biology, arguing that life's unique ability to amplify quantum indeterminism to macroscopic scales was the basis of human thought and free will. J.B.S. Haldane, a geneticist and evolutionary biologist, echoed Jordan's sentiments in a 1934 paper, proposing that life's capacity to scale up quantum indeterminacy was what made it special.
Early proponents of quantum biology sought explanations for life's puzzling properties at the classical scale within the counterintuitive laws of physics at the quantum scale. Yet, Scholes argues that life might be imitating quantum effects instead of employing them directly.
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