Quantum activity may help create life (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, August 21, 2015, 16:55 (3169 days ago)

A very interesting review article on quantum activity as part of life:-http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/43553/title/Good-Vibrations/-"Recent advances in technology have enabled the examination of living systems at a truly molecular level, and life's quantum mechanical behavior is becoming clearer as a result. In 2006, Graham Fleming and Greg Engel at the University of California, Berkeley, were studying photosynthesis......The researchers fired lasers at photosynthetic complexes and examined the emitted light. They discovered that the energy was released in regular pulses called a quantum beats, which indicated that the energy was travelling as a quantum mechanical wave following multiple pathways simultaneously, providing the extraordinarily high efficiency of the process.-"Another place where quantum mechanical behavior has been found is in the action of enzymes. These complex biomolecules enable chemical reactions that would otherwise take thousands or millions of years to happen inside living cells in milliseconds. How enzymes achieve this has long been an enigma. Work in the 1970s suggested that respiratory enzymes work by promoting electron motion via another weird quantum trick called tunnelling, where particles vanish from one position and instantly rematerialize in another without visiting any of the in-between places. Recent research has shown that enzymes also promote tunnelling of protons. This form of quantum teleportation may play a vital role in the production of every single biomolecule on our planet. Scientists have also implicated quantum tunnelling in the detection of odor molecules and in a type of mutation that is caused by proton motion within the DNA molecule. (my bold)-"The quantum world has been implicated in several other biological phenomena. For example, there is evidence that some migratory birds navigate by sensing the Earth's magnetic field using quantum entanglement, whereby separated particles remain quantum-connected.-"The biggest question is how living systems manage to maintain delicate quantum states in warm, wet cells, where they would be expected to vanish extraordinarily quickly due to random molecular vibrations. The latest research suggests that life, paradoxically, uses molecular vibrations to maintain quantum coherence inside its cells. Maybe this is why life is different from all the inanimate stuff: good vibrations keep us on the edge of the quantum and the classical worlds."-Comment: note the importance of enzymes to life. These are giant molecules which have no chance of happening by chance.