Fifteen years ago I visited someone at Daresbury in the UK to talk about
coherent vibrations in living organisms. One of the things that he was
working on was the light harvesting complexes in bacteria, and he said
at the time that he felt that that was where we were most likely to find
quantum coherence in biological systems. Looks like he was right.
Nigel
On 11/01/2013 19:10, [email protected] wrote:
A recent posting on 'http://physicsworld.com' revisits a topic
- quantum coherence in "messy", warm, environmentally coupled systems -
which until several years ago was dismissed as very impossible
--- until "decoherence-protected subspaces" were discovered.
See: "Proteins boost quantum coherence in bacteria"
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/jan/11/proteins-boost-quantum-coherence-in-bacteria
EXCERPT:
[[Until recently, living systems were thought to be "too wet and warm"
to rely on delicate quantum properties such as entanglement and coherence.
The problem is that these properties decay rapidly via random interactions
with things in the outside world, such as vibrating molecules. However,
over the past decade physicists have begun to suspect that quantum
properties play important roles in biochemical processes – including
photosynthesis.]]
Nearly twenty years ago, I had a quasi-friendly disagreement with a well
known physicist on a local talk radio show who resolutely maintained that
quantum coherence could not possibly play any role in the brain (while
he was belittling Roger Penrose's writings), or any biological system
- and that it was nonsensical "new age" pseudo-science.
The enforcers of science orthodoxy can occasionally be very wrong.
-- Lou Pagnucco
