Quantum weirdness is everywhere in life
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Intuition is also very poor in dealing with nonlinear things (think soliton waves and all that stuff). So, trusting an intuition is always wrong and intuition got no place in science anyway, not just in nanoscale.
Even better example, "Heavy things fall faster". Or "The sun revolves around the earth".
As a greater cultural trend there is often a bit of quantum-whitewashing that everything in physics is obvious and straightforward except quantum mechanics because I suffered thru the annoying math and need to show off superiority at being one of the few humans (on a percentage of entire population) who understand a good chunk of QM. Relativity gets the same treatment.
However its important to note that none of physics is very intuitive. Heavy things don't fall faster. The sun doesn't orbit the earth. The general public has some peculiar ideas about the laws of thermodynamics. Orbits in space are not perfect circles. Atomic structure is not a fractally small solar system. QM is typical and normal for physics in having non-intuitive dark corners, that's the norm for all of physics not a peculiarity of QM.
There is shibboleth value in that you define a physicist or a dude who knows physics as a guy who walks around saying QM is the only non-intuitive component of physics. Not because its true, but because that's one of the official physicist mating calls or whatever you want to call it, shibboleth I guess.
There is also the deus ex machina aspect that in all forms of non-technical drama (aka all of it) people who like to write magical fantasy have decided to fool us into thinking its new by copy-and-replace word processing "quantum" in for "Tolkienish magic", see also the multiverse people.
Except that those two particular examples are very easy to explain to (nearly) everybody: 1- you think that heavy things fall faster because this is true when there is air resistance.
2-Q:if you have one 'fixed' object and one rotating object, what do you see from the rotating object? A: the same thing as from the 'fixed' object. So is it the Sun which is revolving or the Earth? You don't feel like the Earth is moving but observation of remotes stars have shown us that this is the case.
Which is NOT the case for QM! A good example: QM 'spooky action at distance', QM predicts that there are non-local instantaneous (FTL) effects, but they cannot be used to send data FTL and this has been measured to be true (mostly).
Explanations do not affect intuition at all, it's too primal to listen to any reason. Even despite the fact that everybody heard this explanation from the elementary school, watching this in action is still mind-blowing. Check it out yourself [1], and answer honestly - was your intuition puzzled by what you've seen?
[1] http://www.iflscience.com/physics/dropping-bowling-ball-and-...
If instead you mean "by what process are they further away from consensus": I would suggest that the recent surge of research in quantum information theory has stimulated a greater interest in foundational issues, which in turn has led to an invigoration of the interpretations debate.
In short Copenhagen still (sadly) rules the day, followed by many worlds and QIT.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.2719
http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.4646
In both cases, de-Broglie Bohm interpretations ruled the day. As the abstract of the latter paper states:
> ...the results do strongly suggest several interesting cultural facts -- for example, that there exist, within the broad field of "quantum foundations", sub-communities with quite different views, and that (relatedly) there is probably even significantly more controversy about several fundamental issues than the already-significant amount revealed in the earlier poll.
The Copenhagen interpretation makes a leap of faith with the Born Rule as it is based on Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics. The work of t'Hooft is a more modern alternative for ensembles where the outcome is stochastic, rather than probabilistic. Photosynthesis has that property, as do many other enzymatic systems.
DeBroglie himself states that matter waves propagate according to a defined distribution; whereas Copehagen interprets that they are probabilistically distributed. In the former case there is a stochastic process, whereas it is only a random process in the latter case.
The difference in ontology being that deBroglie-Bohm is deterministic, i.e. particles have definite positions of which we are merely ignorant, whereas "Copenhagen" is (usually) non-realist, i.e. it is not meaningful to talk about the positions of particles until the moment we measure it.
That is also the difference between the theories of DeBroglie and Bohm, the former is stochastic while the latter is deterministic. Copenhagen theories describe the positions of particles probabilitistically; and the word 'measure' is not being used in the precise mathematical way that it should be. A better translation from Danish would be 'convolute'.
The thing to remember is that when one writes about physics which are centuries old, one must be historiographically consistent. If there is a hyphen between two names for a theory, such that one name is being attributed posthumously; then the student should infer the most recent name is making some error in translation.
When you separate DeBroglie and Bohm, on the basis of their lack of real cooperation, then it is clear to see who was ahead of their time. Bohm is abusing statistical terms in his translations from French, and the meaning of those words is an extremely important detail in the context of Quantum Information Theory. John Von Neumann was contemporaneously working in that context, but it was classified until recent times.
The Born rule was introduced in Born's paper on description of a scattering experiment with help of the \psi function that is a solution of Schroedinger's equation. Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics had nothing to do with it.
Thermodynamics and Linear Algebra have gotten more advanced, since then.
And the reason this is cool is because when you put everyday objects in situations like that stated above, they exhibit quantum interference and everything else.
To ask somebody what interpretation they prefer is akin to asking a mathematician how they interpret the reality of ZFC they prefer. It's interesting, but ultimately pointless, because it has more to do with our ability to interpret than with the real meaning of the statements. To that end, Copenhagen makes the important point - "Shut up and calculate".
No, it doesn't. It adds a few assumptions on top of that. That's the point of the whole debate. To be fair, the many-worlds interpretation also does that.
We're humans, we can't understand equations without knowing what they "mean."
Rather than what it is: our best model.
The Copenhagen interpretation? Not so much. It's an interpretation. The actual physics is in the equations. I can believe the equations without believing the Copenhagen interpretation, or any interpretation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_theories_of_quantu...
Here is McFaddens and Khalili's 1999 paper A quantum mechanical model of adaptive behaviour http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Johnjoe_Mcfadden/publica...
It is an interesting new field and much more scholarly than the OP article allows.
They have a book which goes in depth and Jim has an excellent BBC tv show presenting the key ideas.
Here are Khalili's Royal Institution lecture, the book and tv show, which cover the same material in depth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgQVZju1ZM
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-Edge-Coming-Quantum-Biology/dp/...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04v85cj
The IAS 2012 workshop on Quantum Biology has a number of presentations:
http://www.ias.surrey.ac.uk/workshops/quantumbiology/report....
Here is Jim's 2012 presentation on the role of Quantum tunneling in Adaptive Genetic mutation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iujZr42Aho4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iujZr42Aho4
Also, the way how RNA polymerase work (i.e., transcription) is of quite a quantum nature too.
> Also, the way how RNA polymerase work (i.e., transcription) is of quite a quantum nature too.
Proof?
> Proof?
I never heard of any polymerase simulation which did not involve computational quantum chemistry methods. Cannot even think of any possible classic approximation (again, heuristics aside - they're just masking the quantum nature of the underlying physics).
EDIT: as for transcription, do not forget about the operons. Theirs molecular mechanics is also very quantum.
This is an approximation:
http://mfold.rna.albany.edu/?q=mfold/dna-folding-form
The underlying quantum chemistry (which doesn't need to specifically invoke coherence or tunneling) is required to get truly accurate results. Classical approximations aren't sufficient to measure really subtle energy differences between folded forms.
Further, even a duplex is a "fold" (coiled coils are a structural motif).
You're fixating on the A T G C base form of encoding; DNA contains a lot more information than just that, encoded in its quatenary structure.
McFadden's work is an attempt to provide a foundation for adaptive mutation.
Adaptive mutation is where only well adapted mutations occur at odds with a random explantion.
From (the OP's author) McFadden's and Khalili's 1999 paper: A quantum mechanical model of adaptive mutation
"The principle that mutations occur randomly with respect to the direction of evolutionary change has been challenged by the phenomenon of adaptive mutations. There is currently no entirely satisfactory theory to account for how a cell can selectively mutate certain genes in response to environmental signals. However, spontaneous mutations are initiated by quantum events such as the shift of a single proton (hydrogen atom) from one site to an adjacent one. We consider here the wave function describing the quantum state of the genome as being in a coherent linear superposition of states describing both the shifted and unshifted protons. Quantum coherence will be destroyed by the process of decoherence in which the quantum state of the genome becomes correlated (entangled) with its surroundings."
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Johnjoe_Mcfadden/publica...
Uh, nope.
They assert that E. Coli mutates to develop lactase in a lactose enviroment, it does this quickly and seemingly without adverse mutations - randomness fails to explain this.
McFadden and Khalili propose that adaptive DNA mutation is a quantum computation.
The many possible mutations are explored simultaneously and the quantum state collapses to one highly correlated to the enviroment.
Their 1999 paper A quantum mechanical explanation for adaptive mutation goes in depth.
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Johnjoe_Mcfadden/publica...
This has led to a new scientific discipline Quantum Biology http://www.ias.surrey.ac.uk/workshops/quantumbiology/
"The principle that mutations occur randomly with respect to the direction of evolutionary change has been challenged by the phenomenon of adaptive mutations. There is currently no entirely satisfactory theory to account for how a cell can selectively mutate certain genes in response to environmental signals. However, spontaneous mutations are initiated by quantum events such as the shift of a single proton (hydrogen atom) from one site to an adjacent one. We consider here the wave function describing the quantum state of the genome as being in a coherent linear superposition of states describing both the shifted and unshifted protons. Quantum coherence will be destroyed by the process of decoherence in which the quantum state of the genome becomes correlated (entangled) with its surroundings. Using a very simple model we estimate the decoherence times for protons within DNA and demonstrate that quantum coherence may be maintained for biological time-scales. Interaction of the coherent genome wave function with environments containing utilisable substrate will induce rapid decoherence and thereby destroy the superposition of mutant and non-mutant states. We show that this accelerated rate of decoherence may significantly increase the rate of production of the mutated state."
I'm no physicist but this smacks of total BS. We know that DNA codes for proteins chemically and no sort of "entangled wave function" is going to spontaneously change an A to a G, split or recombine a DNA molecule along a particular gene boundary, or cause a duplication.
The fact that some cells might generate more mutations in response to environment changes doesn't demand quantum weirdness. Did the authors ever think _maybe_ there is a good old enzyme inside cells that intentionally alters the DNA at particular locations, thereby generating mutations?
WTF...
Also, spontaneous mutations occur, and they're caused by interactions between bases and photons; again, these can only be explained by using quantum molecular orbital theory.
I'm not going to the argue the author of your quoted statement is likely to be correct.
" As initially proposed by Delbruck et al. (1935) and Schrodinger (1944) and Watson and Crick (1953), spontaneous mutations are initiated by quantum jump events such as tautomeric shifts in single protons of DNA bases."
You reference catalysts and there are some indications this is a quantum tunneling phenomena :
Here is a talk by Professor Nigel Scrutton of the University of Manchester who has many papers on this, Quantum effects in biological catalysis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnxmHlbtJDI
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Here is Donald's paper criticising McFadden and al-Khalili's ideas http://people.bss.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mjd1014/qevrev.pdf
and their rebuttal : http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0110083v1
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The 2012 Quantum Biology Conference at the IAS has some excellent papers - which are (too briefly) summarised into the OP article. http://www.ias.surrey.ac.uk/workshops/quantumbiology/
I'm not afraid of their hypothesis and I welcome the truth, however weird it may be.
This paper may be totally legit, and quantum magic may really be how biology works. But I can totally see why someone would whip out Occam's Razor and start slashing after reading that paragraph.
Technically speaking, molecular interactions must rely on quantum effects, therefor the encoding does exist at the quantum level, as opposed to the applesauce level.
But this article is not really about genetics or applesauce.
Is that true / nuanced in some particular way I don't know about?
The biophysics of DNA mutation repair -- DNA mutations are a major contribution to genetic changes that lead to observable phenotypes -- are ultimately and firmly quantum. It's unclear at this point whether the quantum phenomena such as coherence or tunneling play any role, but the definition of "quantum" is much larger than just those phenomena. My intuition is that quantum tunnelling of electrons probably plays a role in the kinetics of DNA mutation repair, although this is purely speculative.
Further, some very interesting and mostly ignored experiments by Jackie Barton have demonstrated that the DNA backbone can be used to transmit information; the conjugated pi orbitals of the bases form a long-range, possibly coherent electron path(!) but it's not clear that these phenomena are relevant to evolution.
The processes of DNA replication actually involve hydrogen bonds, and comparing the relative energies of different forms of hydrogen bond groups, at or near the thermal limit (1-2 kcal/mol).
All chemistry is quantum already.
Except, of course, all those physicists that do. http://www.hedweb.com/everett/everett.htm#believes
It's one of the most exquisite bits of biophysics I've ever seen.
If the brain-splitting weirdness of human life has a basis in physics, all we can do is give up and succumb to the utter illogic of it all. Somehow that perspective makes me uncomfortable.
Crystals: Check
Using established scientific terminology mashed together in a way that sounds rigorous on the surface but is really gibberish: Check!