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.
Aiui most people who push for "biology is quantum" specifically want the large-scope effects because they're grasping for it as a way to justify why consciousness is special. Cells are of course plenty quantum at the scale of molecular interactions.
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.
The keys could random walk to lock-ports in finite time iff the search space were 2D or 1D. In 3D space, it is gets very unlikely. Biology solves it by dimensionality reduction, find substrates, cling, slide and find love/compatible hole.
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
Yeah that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. Its as if the laws of physics are running an operating system that wants interesting stuff to happen, and needs only a fragment of a bell curve to seize the day and send us down the appropriate leg of the trousers of time.
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].
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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09971-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09417-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10282-4 https://andrewgyork.github.io/gfp_magnetofluorescence/
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].
[0] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0711968106
https://www.kavlifoundation.org/news/unraveling-the-quantum-...
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 agree. The photographer even has a TED talk about it.
Such a simple concept but really remarkable work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.