Spooky Action:How Quantum Biology Took Flight.

I suspected I was getting in above my head and so I was. Last night's Skeptics in the Pub - Online talk, Does life know about quantum mechanics? - with Professor Jim Al-Khalili, took in a lot of things I didn't, and still don't, understand. Despite Al-Khalili being an able and proven science communicator (as well as a regular TV presenter, a past president of the British Science Association, and recipient of the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication) I was concerned that I wouldn't understand ANY part of his talk.

Thankfully I did understand at least some of it. At the start, Al-Khalili explained that the first half would be the easy bit but then everything's relative - that's one scientific fact we can all understand. Al-Khalili started by telling us that quantum biology is a new area of research and asking us to imagine a Venn diagram with three circles representing biology, chemistry, and physics.

The three scientific disciplines most of us learn at school (or fail to learn because we're too busy messing about with Bunsen burners). Quantum biology sits right in the centre of that Venn diagram. It's not magic - though sometimes it looks, and feels, like it. Think about a tennis ball. We can accurately describe the dynamics of a tennis ball in motion using standard Newtonian mechanics.

The same is true of much larger objects. For example, planets. The same, however, is not true for much smaller things:- cancer cells, viruses, and DNA. The atomic nucleus is the playground of quantum mechanics where Newton's laws no longer work. DNA, for example, is right on the boundary of Newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics.

This was already starting to get confusing, and technical, for me (and was made worse by missing a small section - SitP - Online's traditional tech gremlins had returned for their first talk of 2024 and when I got back on Al-Khalili had moved on to quarks, dark matter, and the Higgs boson) but was made easier with a cartoon of a 'quantum skier' (below) which illustrates the strange world of quantum mechanics.

Our skier has gone both sides of the tree yet the tree is still standing and he hasn't been cut in half. Obviously, this can't actually happen in the world we see on a daily basis. But in the quantum world, particles can move in two different directions at once, they can pass through walls like ghosts, and they can communicate with each other from seemingly impossibly long distances.

As atoms, the molecules of life itself, are quantum mechanical this is very important - and very interesting to scientists. Quantum biology says there is something different about the molecular structure of living organisms. Something that doesn't apply to non-living organisms. Most physicists, however, don't like to study this. Or even talk about it.

But some do. Quantum biology first rose to prominence as a subject of interest in the early 20th century through the work of people like Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrodinger and there were two mains reasons. Firstly, there had been success with quantum mechanics in the fields of physics an chemistry and, secondly, there had been a rise in the idea of organicism.

Organicists, scientifically, were split into two groups. The reductionists (who believed everything could be broken down into its constituent parts) and those who subscribed to the idea of 'vitalism', the theory that there is a 'spark of life' that makes conscious existence possible. Dr Frankenstein would have seen the merits of both sides of the argument.

That's where quantum biology is now, a fusing of the two beliefs. The idea that there is, indeed, a "spark of life" but it's not magic and neither is it God given. It is something that science should, and is trying to, understand. It's slowly getting there.

One of the first scientists to really push forward the idea was Pasucal Jordan (1902-80) who, in 1932, wrote the first paper on quantum biology. There was a problem with Jordan though. Not with his scientific work but with the man himself. He was a Nazi. A full on card carrying Nazi who joined the Luftwaffe.

That meant that, after the war, his ideas were discredited. Though his ideas weren't Nazi in intention, like - for example - eugenics, the theories he had put forward were mostly ignored and forgotten. Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961) kept the flame burning with his 1944 book What Is Life? which, as far as I can tell, promoted the idea of cooling everything down so that we can witness quantum effects in action. It's obviously far more technical than that but I've already pointed out that a lot of this is over my head.

Al-Khalili asked us to imagine human beings being like steam engines. Converting low entropy energy into being able to live and work. But can we reach down, through the thermodynamic chaos that underpins this energy, into the quantum mechanical structures that explain everything? Steam engines can't. That's because they're machines. But humans aren't machines. Are they?

Along with University of Surrey colleagues including Johnjoe McFadden, Al-Khalili has studied creatures that have used quantum effects to aid their navigation. Some mammals and some insects but the most interesting example came from a very unlikely corner of the avian world - the European robin.

Each winter, the European robin migrates from Scandinavia and Siberia to the Mediterranean (like many of us, it prefers the warmer climes) and, in doing so, it uses its sense of the direction of the Earth's magnetic field which is, apparently, very weak. So how does it do it? Where is its compass?

Nobody is 100% certain as yet but the leading theory, at the moment, is that there is a protein - cryptochrome, in the robin's eye that it uses to detect the magnetism of the Earth. This, I'm told, would only be possible using quantum biology. Al-Khalili and McFadden have written a book, Life on the Edge:The Coming Age of Quantum Biology, that explores this and other related theories and, with the support of the Leverhulme Trust, they've started a research centre.

There they can look into this new, exciting, confusing, and still developing world. But it was then that I really lost touch with the talk. Enzyme tunnelling, magnetoreception, quantum coherence, superposition, DNA mutations, photosynthesis, non-trivial quantum phenomena, and entanglement all cropped up and I didn't really understand them - but would love to learn more.

Entanglement is so strange that it seems even Einstein couldn't quite get his head round it and referred it to as "spooky action". The final third of the talk was, for me, a headfuck. Energy landscapes, density functional theories, tautometric probability, the Caldeira-Leggett equation (according to Al-Khalili, "a very pretty little thing" - have a look below and decide for yourself), and lots of complicated graphs left me scratching my head but I came away with Al-Khalili's message that not only has life evolved the ability to use quantum mechanics, it has also evolved the ability to stop, and to deny, quantum mechanics.

A Q&A session took in telepathy, AI, twins, the nature of consciousness, Deepak Chopra (not a lot of love for him in the world of the Skeptics), Star Trek, and Daniel Dennett and although Al-Khalili didn't show the audience his cats (something of a SitP - Online tradition) he did announce he had two, Charlie and Honey.

It was one of the most difficult SitP talks I'd ever attended but it was rewarding and it's given me a lot to think about - as well as a lot to look up. Thanks to Skeptics in the Pub - Online, thanks to Clio Bellenis of the Winchester branch for hosting, and thanks to Professor Jim Al-Khalili for messing with my tiny mind.