Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What is quantum biology?

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

Daniel and Kelly explore how biological systems rely on the quantum nature of matter.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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If a baby is giggling in the backseat, they're probably happy. If a baby is crying in the back seat, they're probably hungry. But if a baby is sleeping in the back seat, will you remember they're even there? When you're distracted, stressed, or not usually the one who drives, them, the chances of forgetting them in the back seat are much higher. It can happen to anyone. Parked cars get hot fast and can be deadly. So get in the habit of checking the back seat when you leave. A message from NHTSA and the ad council. Hey Kelly, how do biologists feel about quantum mechanics? Well, I don't feel comfortable speaking

for all biologists, but I'd say for myself, I'm mostly uncertain. Are you uncertain about whether quantum mechanics makes sense? Well, when I was working on my PhD, I did some work on neurotransmitters and steroid hormones, and all of that was so complicated and often didn't go as predicted. It's hard for me to believe that when you go another step down to the quantum mechanics level that we could make any sense of it. So are you tempted to just like brush all the quantum details under the rug? Well, I'd be okay with letting physicists worry about the particles doing their quantum thing,

and, you know, I'll worry about the pests and the parasites. That feels like a fair division of labor, unless... Uh-oh. Unless what? Unless it's actually all entangled, then you can never escape quantum mechanics. No! Excuse my evil cackle. It was a good evil cackle.

Oh, good. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I've been practicing my evil quantum wizard cackle. I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith, an adjunct assistant professor at Rice University, and I've been trying to avoid thinking about quantum mechanics and animal behavior. But is that even possible?

I guess the answer is definitively no. It's collapsed to know as of this conversation. Especially if you're a guest host on a physics podcast, Kelly. That's not a great way to avoid quantum mechanics. I've made bad choices. Well, welcome all of you to the podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio, in which we marinate in the mysteries of quantum mechanics. We get down and dirty into the mud of the quantum realm.

We try to understand how this incredible experience that we live, all the ice cream and the goats and the blueberries and the blue skies can somehow be made of these tiny frothing quantum particles that behave according to fundamentally different rules than the ones we experience. And we don't even understand the biology rules, but let's try the physics ones. The whole point of reductionism is to say, well, everything is big and complicated up here. Let's dig down deep. Let's pull the universe apart and try to understand it at its tiniest little bits.

Maybe down there things will be simple, will be clear, will be crisp. And from that understanding, from that firm foundation, maybe we could build up a comprehension of everything else that flows from that, including goats and ice cream and parasites. Lull. I'm not sure I believe it, but we'll find out. It's a big goal. It's a stretch goal, let's say, of science. You know, along the way, we hope to learn a few things, but that's sort of the fantasy, right? That we could understand the universe in terms of its smallest little bits. I do you think we'll get there. It's going to be a little bit hard to connect across these levels, but it's a worthy goal. Often in science, we do a division of labor. We say, look, economists can worry about things at a certain level. and paleontologists worry about things at another level,

and quantum physicists worry about things at a different level. And often these levels are distinct. Like when you do fluid mechanics, you don't really have to understand all the forces between the little particles. And when you do economics, you don't have to understand the chemical reactions inside everybody's fingers. You can, like, abstract that away, and you can do science at so many different levels in our universe.

It's sort of an amazing fact, and it's like the reason why we have anything but quantum mechanics and particle physics. And so today you're going to try to convince me that we can understand animal behavior better by connecting with our quantum people, is that right? Today we're going to ask if that's really fair. We're going to ask if there are cracks in that division of labor, if quantum mechanics is bleeding through somehow.

Are there clues in the way we behave and animals behave and in the biological world that reveal the fundamental quantum nature of the universe, or is it deeply locked behind these philosophical walls and control? completely abstracted away. It would be so nice if you could go into your own little cove and you didn't have to look out, but I'm guessing the answer is going to be. You see more clearly when you see from a variety of angles. Well, today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question.

What is quantum biology? This does sound like the name of a weird startup, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. I hadn't thought of it that way, but yeah, I'd work there. I'd apply for a job at quantum biology. Depends on which quant do they use to pay you, I suppose. Oh, no, that's true. And then how good their latte station is.

Is that how you decide what job to take? Well, you know, I guess I'm not employed by anyone right now. But that would help. That would help. And if they'll do my laundry, that would be great. Aren't you self-employed? Oh, yeah, I guess that counts. So you should ask yourself for a latte station.

I make a pretty mean latte. I take good care of myself. There you go. And you do your own laundry, right? So the boss is really providing over there on the science farm. You make a good point. Yeah, we do our own laundry around here, but we're the bosses. All right.

Point made. But we're not here to talk about laundry and coffee today. We're here to dig into biological processes and to ask whether there is a quantum nature to it, whether the quantum description of the universe, the quantum nature of reality reveals itself somehow in biology, if we can find place in biology where quantum mechanics is necessary to make things work or to understand them. And our usual place to go to to get our conversation started is the clever listeners of DJEU. Should we check in with them first? Absolutely, let's do that. Thanks very much, everybody who volunteers to answer these weird questions that you get asked

without any chance to prepare. We love hearing your voice and your thoughts. And we love if you participated. We are talking to you. That's right. You've been listening for years without participating, but you know you want to. Please write to me to questions at Danielanhorpe.com. So before you hear these answers, think about it for yourself for a minute. What is quantum biology? Here's what people had to say. Quantum biology is a study of macroscopic life and how such life influences and is influenced by quantum effects. For example, I'm pretty sure microtubials and specific cells are believed to exhibit potential quantum behavior? Well, it's definitely a super cool sounding term, but maybe it's applying the non-deterministic nature

of quantum mechanics to biology. I'm thinking about hydrothermal vents and quantum randomness helping to generate early DNA and early life. So quantum biology, I guess, would be looking to see within the human body or other animals to see if there's some weird quantum effects going on or if our body somehow uses quantum mechanics in a way. So perhaps our senses or our organs or our brain does something really weird where it communicates information really fast in an impossible way. And so we're thinking that maybe there's some quantum phenomenon going on. If we're not talking about Ant-Man in the quantum realm, then I think I've heard something about this with bees and their ability to see on ultraviolet, something quantum effects with flowers and vision.

I do know what biology is. I kind of know what quantum is. Maybe quantum biology helps explain quantum phenomena that happens in biology, maybe something like bioluminescence, maybe something with, like, how energy is transferred in, like, photosynthesis. So maybe there's some quantum phenomena that can help explain biological processes. What is quantum biology? I don't know. I would guess quantum biology is the study of the crossover of quantum physics and biology. I kind of recall hearing a couple of years ago that be discovered that birds are able to tap into some quantum process and use that for navigation.

And so I would guess maybe it's something similar along those lines of different. types of biological creatures and how they are able to utilize quantum physics? So those were some really great answers. And for me, they sparked some old memories. Like, I feel like I had heard something about quantum processes and bird navigation, which, you know, ties together my interest in animal behavior with quantum stuff. And it made me wonder, does something like cancer, like caused by mutations from UV radiation? Is that, does that count as quantum biology. So what are we, what is the scope that we're talking about here in particular? I see what you're doing. You're going to say quantum mechanics kills people,

right? You're going to try to make us look bad. Wait, is it, it's my turn to be the one who delivers the bad news? I think your evil laugh is better, but I'll work on it. That was a good quantum wizard cackle. I liked it. Thanks. But yeah, that's exactly what we're going to try to do today, is trying to understand where quantum mechanics affects biology. And that's really what quantum biology is, is the understanding of the impact of quantum mechanics, the rules of quantum mechanics, and how they filter up to the big stuff,

the sloshy stuff, the goopy stuff that we love in biology. So I'll be interested in seeing if understanding quantum mechanics mostly helps us understand when things go wrong, or if it also helps us understand, like, helpful things like navigation. Is it just, does it kill you when it messes up? Or can it be helpful? Yeah, it'd be fascinating if you needed, like, quantum mechanics in order to enjoy sex or something like that. That would be cool.

That'd be a good selling point for quantum mechanics. I would definitely care then. Yeah, I'd buy that book. All right, so let's start off by reminding ourselves what the rules of the quantum realm are. What are we talking about here? Because we understand that physics tells us about how things move and fall and inertia and motion and gravity and all that stuff. But that's the kind of stuff we already find intuitive. We know that dolphins know the rules of fluid mechanics and that birds understand how to fly.

And of course they have to fall at the loss of physics. But that's classical physics. That's the physics that we grew up with, the physics that we have an intuition for, the physics that defines why a ball flies through the air into your glove or why a car crashes or doesn't crash. What we need to understand today are the rules of the quantum realm, which seem fundamentally different. The physics basically of the tiny particles instead of the big stuff.

So does that rule out cancer caused by solar radiation? No, it does not. Absolutely. Okay. As long as we can find a quantum link, then we can blame quantum mechanics for all of cancer. Don't worry. We'll get there. Oh, that's great.

Okay, great. I look forward to it. Let's do a quick review on what is the nature of the quantum realm? What are we talking about here? What are the rules of quantum mechanics that could influence biology in a weird, sort of unusual, non-classical way? And point number one is that quantum mechanics has an uncertainty. And this is often described as like Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

There's fuzziness to the universe. But it's much more than that. It's much deeper than just like we don't know where that electron is. Philosophically, it requires a complete revision of your understanding of what location means. Like in sort of Bill Clinton sense, like what is means when we say where the electron is. This is one of the raunchier shows we've done in a while, but okay, all right. Yeah, I'm trying to keep it sexy. In this case, what I mean is that it's more than we don't know where the electron is.

It's that the electron doesn't have a location at every point. Like when you think about a baseball flying through your backyard, it's very natural to think that it has a location at every point in time. And like freshman students of physics learn to write the trajectory as a function, an X of T, which tells you where it is at every point in time, because we assume that objects exist somewhere at every point, and that they have a smooth path. They don't, like, disappear from here and just appear over there. It's like a very basic assumption about the way the world works, but that's not true

for electrons. Electrons have locations at moments, like snapshots. It's here at this time. It's there at that time. But they don't have paths. They don't have to go from here to there. if they can be here and then later be there. You don't have to connect them.

In fact, you can't connect them with a smooth path. I guess as an animal behaviorist, I was hoping that that uncertainty sort of provides an at, like if you average it, you get an answer that tells you everything you need to know so you can ignore it. But we'll see if that's true. Yes, exactly. That seems to happen when you have lots of electrons. When you're averaging over many, many particles, then things seem to come together and

behave differently. Like you have an individual electron, it doesn't have a path. But if you have 10 to the 29 particles that exist in a baseball, that does have a path. And so the weird thing about quantum mechanics is that when you zoom out, when you aggregate it over many, many particles, different rules emerge. And that's the mystery of the universe we were talking about earlier. Like, we don't really know why stuff does emerge. Why, when you zoom out, the rules seem to be different? Why can you write simple mathematical stories about the motion of a baseball without really understanding what it's made out of and what the rules are for what it's made out of?

It's this incredible magic trick we do that allows us to do science at so many different levels without understanding the internals. Agreed. But we've definitely learned that electrons don't have this property. They don't have a path or trajectory. They have multiple possibilities and they can maintain those possibilities simultaneously. Like an electron interacts with something. It might go left or might go right, for example, when it hits a magnetic field.

And the universe allows it to have those possibilities simultaneously to say, well, maybe you went Maybe you went right. We don't know. Both of them are possible. You sometimes hear this set is like, oh, the electron is in two places at once. That makes it sound like, oh, it's got path. It's just got more than one of them. But the reality is it doesn't have a path. It has two probabilities of being in those places, which you can maintain simultaneously without actually being in either one. So I am assuming we'll get to the electron transport chain. I'm feeling amazed that stuff like this works when you can't depend on your partner, the electron, to do their part. Yeah, it's amazing to me that anybody relies on electrons to do anything. They don't seem very cooperative. The second crucial element you have to understand about quantum mechanics to think about

its impact on biology is that randomness. Like if an electron can interact with a magnetic field, it has a probability to do one thing and a probability to do something else. That's very quantum mechanical. But then sometimes we make a measurement. We say, well, I want to know. Is the electron over here or is it over there? So we interact with it with like an eyeball or something big and classical. It forces the universe to make a choice. Is the electron over here or is it over there? We want one of those snapshots to collapse those probabilities. Something incredible happens in that moment or something which we never otherwise experience. True actual randomness. We think we experience randomness

in the universe a lot, like when you roll a die or you flip a coin or they pull lottery numbers, but that's not actual randomness. That's just chaos. That's just something which is complicated and hard to predict. But if you repeated it the same way, exactly the same way twice, you would get the same answer. The chaos is when things are very sensitive to exactly how you've done them. Randomness means if you do things exactly the same way twice, you get different outcomes. So I'm finding myself realizing that I'm not 100% clear on the difference between randomness and uncertainty.

Does the randomness generate uncertainty? Yeah, absolutely. It works sort of both ways. The randomness generates an uncertainty, but the uncertainty allows for randomness. The uncertainty says, oh, there's several possible outcomes for the electron. And then the universe comes and it picks one. How does that happen? If the electron has a 50% chance of being left and 50% chance of being right,

somehow the universe decides, oh, this electron's left or this electron's right. We don't know what the mechanism is for that. We don't have any way to do that ourselves. Like if you came to me and said, Daniel, build me a device which will generate random outcomes, left or right, ones or zeros. I couldn't do it unless I connected myself somehow to a truly random quantum process. Like, I couldn't build a random number generator on a computer. You probably have one on your computer, but it's not actually a random number generator.

You run it twice the same way. It'll generate exactly the same series twice. The only way we have to generate randomness in the universe is to connect to quantum mechanical processes. Cosmic rays and electrons and anything tiny in quantum can actually be random. And so we do have random generators using quantum processes? And can you give me an example of like a process that requires that actual kind of randomness as opposed to, you know, the random number generators I can get on Google? Most things don't need real quantum randomness.

Most things are fine with what we call pseudo random number generators that approximate randomness. And so for most applications, like you're running a simulation or something, you can do just fine with pseudo random number generators. You can create real random number generators if, for example, You have like a camera pointed at a cosmic ray detector. Cosmic rays are quantum particles, and they are truly random. If you use that as like a seed, then you can generate actual random numbers. But there are very, very few things that really need true randomness.

That's good, because I use the Google random number generator a lot. Yeah, it's fine, exactly. It's fine. Okay, all right. So we got uncertainty and randomness. Is there anything else we need to know about quantum mechanics before we move on? Well, the word quantum means something important. Quantum means like a unit, a discrete chunk.

And that tells us something about how the world works. Quantum mechanics gives us a picture of the universe that's not smooth and infinitely divisible, but built out of discrete packets. And that's a little weird. It's not something we're used to. Like if you imagine talking to your friend or cackling loudly, right? You can cackle loudly or you can cackle quietly and you can make that cackle quieter and quieter. And it feels like you could keep making that quieter forever.

Like keep making it half as loud and half as loud and half as loud. And you could just keep going forever, right? There's no minimum loudness. Okay. Sounds like it would get annoying pretty quick. It's like that song, right? A little bit quieter now. A little bit softer now.

But it doesn't go on forever and that's why you enjoy it. Yeah, exactly. If it went on forever, it would be annoying. But you can't do that with things like a light beam. A light beam seems like it's continuous. It seems like you could dial it up. to really bright or really dim and that you could keep making it dimmer and dimmer and dimmer forever. But the truth is you can't because that light beam is made of quantum objects,

individual packets of light, photons. And so there is a minimum brightness. You dial your laser down so it's emitting one photon at a time. That's the minimum brightness. You can't go to half a photon or a quarter of a photon or an eighth of a photon. So a photon is something we don't expect that we'll ever break down in more detail, ever? Yeah, that's a good question. Is a photon fundamental or is it made of other stuff? As far as we know, it's a ripple in a quantum field that is itself fundamental. It can't be broken into smaller bits. But even if it could, it wouldn't be a photon anymore. So still photons are the discrete unit of light. You can't break them any smaller. So electrons are made

up of smaller parts. But when you take those parts out, it's not an electron anymore. So electrons are also fundamental parts. Is that right? Yeah, we don't know if electrons are made of smaller bits or not. Protons certainly are. Electrons, we don't know. We suspect probably they are, but we don't know what's inside them. But yeah, if you took them apart, it wouldn't be an electron anymore. The same way, like, if you take a car part, it's not a car anymore. It's just a bunch of parts. Got it. All right. So the incredible thing is that these are the rules of the quantum realm. They describe how tiny particles interact and how they move through the universe or how they don't move through the universe because they don't go at all, how they exist and froth and fluctuate.

And we think that the whole universe is made of these pieces. These are like the fundamental Legos of the universe. They follow these rules. But when you put enough of these Legos together, something weird happens, right? Different rules seem to emerge. You put a lot of these particles together, as we were saying earlier, then you can start to use classical physics to describe it. Baseballs don't have any real randomness.

Sound waves can be made softer and softer and softer. And so we have the rules of the quantum realm, and then we have the rules of sort of our realm. And we don't really know how these are connected. So I am yet again feeling the impulse to say, doesn't this mean that we can just average out the quantum stuff and we don't need to go there? Most of the time we can. And that's why it took us so long to figure out quantum mechanics. Because in our world, it's not obvious. We can mostly ignore the quantum nature of our world, or we would have seen it much earlier, right?

took until like the discovery of radioactivity, which triggered a whole revolution in the way we think about the world and the atom and discovery of all those particles 100 years ago and the photoelectric effect for us to see cracks in the classical world. So it's very, very subtle and most of the time we can ignore it. And you biologists can pretend quantum mechanics is not even a thing. Yes. But that's the question of today's episode is, are there cracks like that in biology where the world reveals its true nature? Do you have a sense for when we started asking questions like this? When did we start understanding quantum mechanics and when is the earliest instance where people tried to like meld it with biology? Quantum mechanics and its foundational

ideas date to about like 1900. It was Albert Einstein who came up with the idea that light came in these little packets. We have a whole episode about how the photon was discovered from the photo electric effect. Basically, you shine bright lights on metal and it will boil off electrons. And how many electrons you get and the energy that they have tells you a lot about. how energy is transferred from the light beam to the metal and it reveals actually that the light is made of these little packets because electrons can only absorb one packet at a time and how that filters into biology is a fascinating question I think only in the last few decades have people been able to make

these connections between quantum mechanics and biology though I think there's been a lot of woo you know a lot of like hmm we don't understand the brain where is free will wait maybe quantum mechanics feels in that gap so So I think in terms of solid science, we'll dig into a bunch of examples, but I think it's just a few decades old. Oh, man, that's truly, you know, on your NSF grants, you're supposed to say you're interdisciplinary. But usually the answer is like, well, I do two different kinds of neurochemistry. But this seems to really fit the bills. All right, that's been a lot to absorb, my friends.

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transport chain is. I have purposefully not thought about the electron transport chain since I was a freshman undergrad and I've never had to teach an intro biology class. So I've never had to go over it again. So how about you tell us about the electron transport chain? Well, I have recently had to review this because my daughter is a freshman in high school and she's taking biology. And she prefers to ask me these questions rather than my wife who is a PhD in biochemistry because when she asks my wife, she gets what my daughter calls a college lecture about it. And when she asks me, she gets a very short answer because I don't understand it very well. So here goes, electron transport chains are part of basically how we transfer energy. You eat food, it goes into

your stomach. How does that energy get converted into a useful form for your body to take advantage of. Well, there's a whole series of reactions there. There's oxidation, there's reduction. All those things are part of converting your nutrients into basically sugars that other parts of your body can use. And how do these chemical reactions happen? Like, why do they happen? They happen because they're energetically favorable. Stuff bumps into other stuff and it finds that it can click together and in doing so release some energy. In this case, the energy that's released are electrons moving around. Basically, electrons are sliding down energy gradients. It's like you're building a snowy hill for the electron, and it just wants to coast on down to the bottom. So these

electron transport chains are molecules passing electrons from one to the other in order to release some energy and release it into some storage unit, some ATP or some other kind of sugar that the body can later use. Your sledding example sounds so fun. I'm imagining all the electrons in my cells right now going, whee! And I feel so much better about the energy I'm using. And so mostly this is fairly straightforward. And the sledding example works because things just slide downhill. But sometimes there's a barrier. Like sometimes the electron is trapped in a little valley. And we'd love to get over a hill down to the next deeper valley where it has lower energy, but it can't get over the hump, right? It's like trapped in a valley. And so

if the electron was purely a classical object, like a kid on a sled, and then They weren't going fast enough to go over that hill, then they'd be trapped there forever, right? If you don't have the speed to go over that hill, you just can't go over that hill because classical objects have to go places. If you're here and then you're there, you have to go from here to there. There has to be like a continuous chain of locations between here and there for you to exist in. And if you don't have the energy to get to some of those locations, boom, you're trapped, right? That's why people can get stuck in a valley if you don't have, like, speed to get over the hill.

So I'm having trouble connecting that example to like the biology. So are you essentially saying that like it had to be a quantum particle that did this? Because biology absolutely required quantum tunneling to be able to make all of this work because there are hills going down the electron transport chain that we couldn't get over otherwise. Yes, that's exactly right. The electron transport chain is not just a smooth hill. There are some barriers there. And in order for the electrons to get from the top to the bottom, they have to get over those barriers.

But they don't have enough energy to get over those barriers. But they can do their quantum magic, right? Quantum particles don't have to go over barriers. Quantum particles can be on one side of a barrier, and then later they can be on the other side of a barrier without ever going through the barrier. If you have a probability of being here and a probability of being there,

you can be here now and be there later without going from here to, there. So this is the process we call quantum tunneling. If an electron didn't have this capability, if it was a classical object, then it couldn't get over these barriers. And again, we're using the barriers in the sledding example as a way to visualize, like the chemical reactions, the energy gradients that are involved in this electron transport chain, getting the energy from the nutrients into your sugar, a whole series of chemical reactions that involve like sliding down these energy gradients. But there are bumps in this energy gradients. And the electrons, have to quantum tunnel through those bumps, through those barriers, or the whole thing wouldn't

work. Wow. Okay. And so there's a bunch of randomness and there's a bunch of uncertainty. Is it surprising that the electron transport chain works as well as it does, like that they don't quantum tunnel their way out of the transport chain or something? Yeah, that's a really cool question. The concept that there's uncertainty and randomness makes it seem like it's out of control, like it's unpredictable, right? But remember that, Quantum Mechanics does make very firm predictions. It's just that it predicts the probabilities. It doesn't predict the exact outcome because there's real randomness.

But it's very firm on what the possible outcomes are. So it doesn't say like, oh, the electron can just do anything at once. It's not like there's no rules at all and anything goes. This isn't like a rave, right? There are still rules. And the quantum mechanics tells us the electron can be here or it can be there. You can't just like go willy-nilly and join some other party. And so it still determines what happens.

If you average over many electrons, you can very, very accurately predict what's going to happen. And since there are lots of molecules and lots of electrons involved, then even if you can't predict an individual electron, you can still rely on the processes happening at a reliable level. That's kind of amazing that that system evolved. It is sort of amazing. And it relies on the quantum nature of the electron. You could not build this system out of tiny little balls of stuff that move the way baseball do. So the quantum nature of the electron is crucial to the electron transport chain, which is really fundamentally like our entire power chain, based on my understanding of ninth grade biology. Now, so here's the thing.

Biologists have to take physics classes. And it really seems to me like they should start the lectures for physics for biology majors by saying, look, the electron transport chain couldn't happen without quantum mechanics. Yeah. And then we'd pay attention. You're saying intro science could be taught in a more compelling and fascinating way without turning off masses of people. What? Really? Unless it's the classes taught by my friends who I'm sure are all doing it the best possible way. I do think it's really fascinating. A lot of the stuff is often brushed over because also there's just so much to learn.

Like when you're learning about the electron transport chain, there's so many details. Their biology is so complicated already. You know, so many interactions, so many pieces. It's amazing to me that it ever works. You know, it's like a huge Rube Goldberg machine designed by a crazy person. Yeah. Rube Goldberg machines are already kind of wild. But yes, one that's made by a crazy person would be even more wild.

Okay, so are most of the examples, things like intro biology or like molecular biology stuff? I guess we haven't gotten to my pet topic yet. We're going to get there. We're going to get to neurons and brains. Okay, okay. All right. So what's next then? On the topic of energy transport are photons, right?

Like plants, for example, they don't eat peanut butter sandwiches and need to digest them the same way we do. They have a different process. So interacting with light opens lots of questions about the quantum nature of light. Like how does photosynthesis all work? How do we absorb that energy? And then even for humans, light is something we rely on to build our picture of the world. Does it matter that it's made of individual photons? Could we see individual photons?

To me, that's a really fascinating question. Like whether we're able to interact with a quantum object, experience a quantum object, like a single photon hitting your eyeball. Could you even see that? Oh, and you know, plants sometimes turn in the direction of light. Could they turn in the direction of a single photon? Yeah, right.

Really fascinating. I think about this a lot when I'm looking up at the night sky and you're looking at some really dim star. Some star, you're just barely able to make. out. Imagine being really close to that star. It's an enormous furnace. It's pumping out like huge numbers of photons out into the universe. If you're very close to it, then your eyeball is going to get roasted. You're inundated with photons. As you get further and further away, those photons spread out more and more. And now you're like between photons. And so the number of photons

hitting your eyeball is dropping. And now if you're millions or billions of light years away, you're so far away that most of the photons are not going to hit your eyeball, but one of them might. so to me a really interesting question is like how many photons do you need to see from a star to see that it's there what's the minimum number you need do we know we actually have done this study it's really fascinating people have been wondering like can the human eyeball see an individual photon if you fire a single photon at the eyeball will somebody experience a flash in the dark or do you need like five or ten or five million photons so people have been trying to do this for decades, it's really hard because number one,

you need to be able to generate single photons, which is not something that's easy to do experimentally. And number two, you need to know that a photon was generated. Like if somebody's sitting there with a clicker and they're going to press a button when they see a photon, you need to be able to correlate that with like an actual photon hitting their eye. But photons are tricky, right? Like you can't see a photon from the side.

You can only see a photon, but it hits your eyeball. So like a little glowing packet, right? So this is something that was really tricky to do. They were only really just able to investigate conclusively a few years ago. What was the piece of technology that opened up that question? Like better lasers or something? It's always better lasers. Probably not better lasers this time.

So it was fancy optics, right? So essentially what you do is you take a light source and you crank it down until it's shooting out just a few photons at once. But again, you got to know when the photons are being shot out. So you can ask, like, are you seeing real photons? Are you just randomly clicking the button? In order to know when a photon arrives, what they do is they use this fancy piece of optics that splits a photon. So you take a photon and it hits a special crystal called a down converter. And what it does is it splits each photon into two photons that have half as much energy.

And so one you can use to tell, oh, the photon was here and the other one you can send to your subject's eyeball. So does that mean they're only detecting half a photon? Oh, awesome question. They're still detecting one photon. It's just lower energy. So if you want to send people like a green photon, then you need to produce photons that have twice as much energy as a green photon and then split it into two green photons.

Send one to the eyeball and the other one to your recording device that tells you when the photon was made. Because anything that's emitting individual photons, those are quantum objects that are going to be really. random. You can't control when they're made. We have to record when you made one. And then you have to hope that your observer doesn't blink at the wrong time. Exactly. So in 2016, they did these experiments with humans in dark basements shooting green photons at their eyeballs. And those folks got it right. They were able to like press the button at the right time to indicate that they saw

individual photons hitting their eyeballs, which to me is kind of amazing. I guess one photon is all you need to activate a rod or a cone? Yes, those rods and cones have these proteins in them, which are very, very sensitive, and they change configurations when they absorb a single photon, absolutely. Are we unique? It's so nice to think we're unique, or are we the only ones who can view just one photon? Definitely not. We've seen this actually in frogs earlier, and it's easier to do in frogs because you can just

like take their eyes and put like voltage clamps on the optic nerve behind the eyeball and you don't have to worry so much about them. You can't do that kind of stuff for humans, so it's more complex. complicated, but frogs can definitely see single photons. And I suspect lots of animals have more powerful eyes than we do. Eagles probably can definitely see single photons. But would they need to see in an environment that dark? They're not usually hunting that dark. That's true. Maybe owls then. Maybe owls can see individual photons. Yeah. And so that's interacting with a quantum object, right? And that opens the door to a really interesting

philosophical question about experiencing a quantum object. You've just told me that we can experience a quantum object by seeing one photon hit our eye. So what do you have in mind that's different? I'm wondering if we can experience its quantum nature. Like something that's really interesting about a photon is that it can have this superposition of two possibilities. Say, for example, you produce this photon in a way that's not clear whether it's going to go into your left eye or your right eye.

It is a 50% chance of going either one. According to quantum mechanics, it can maintain both of those possibilities, right? As long as it doesn't interact with a classical object that collapses its wave function, it can maintain both possibilities. So imagine now you're doing the same experiment, but you're not sure which eyeball it's going to hit. If you're interacting with a quantum object, is it possible to, like, experience both branches of the wave function to, like, see it simultaneously in both eyes?

What would that be like, subjectively, to experience something with its uncertainty? or does our eyeball just like collapse the way of function and we experience it in left or the right? If you're interacting with a quantum object, it opens the door to this possibility of like experiencing its quantum nature. So my brain is trying to catch up. My guess would be that it collapses when it hits the eye. Yeah. But what's the answer? Do we know?

We don't know. This is not an experiment we've been able to do. Right. It's much more complicated than the initial experiment because now you have to prepare a photon and have it be. in this quantum superposition using like some half silver mirror or whatever and you know the classical theory quantum mechanics agrees with you it says look the eyeball is a big classical object it's going to collapse a wave function you're going to see it in one eye or the other eye but there are alternative theories of quantum mechanics that say you know the collapse happened sort of spontaneously

depending on the size of the object you're interacting with so like differently sized parts of the eye might have different rates of inducing the collapse i don't know it's kind of bonkers but it's really fun edge of quantum biology for me, trying to get things to experience their quantum nature. I wonder if our brains are even prepared for that. Mine's not. I mean, it seems to me that when it interacts with the rods or the cones, that that should collapse it, but I don't know. I don't know, because rods and cones are just made of quantum objects, right? At the edge of the rods and cones are quantum particles bound into molecules. Why should that collapse the wave function? That never made any sense to me. And orthodox quantum mechanics says, oh, you put enough quantum objects together

becomes a classical object. What does that really mean? How many quantum objects do you need to put together before it becomes classical? None of those questions have answers. Wow. Okay. Well, my brain needs a little brain break. So how about we take a commercial break? And then we'll move on to magneto reception. Another example. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers, the pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control.

And they're saying like, okay, pull this, do this, pull that, turn this. It's just, I can do it in my eyes closed. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devon. And on our new show, No Such Thing, we get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise.

And then, as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge.

It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt and it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call, said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation, and I just wanted to call on and let her know. There's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff Podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a nonprofit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front line.

of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat Army veteran and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. I don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury

because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable.

These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA, Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny, you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha.

On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. My brain is back to full capacity. I'm ready to rock. Daniel, let's give me another example. We're going to be talking about magneto reception. I feel like this is probably when we start talking. about birds in migration? Maybe. Yes. Yes, exactly. All right, let's do it. One of the things I love thinking about in terms of quantum mechanics and biology is what it's like to experience the world differently. Like if we had different senses, you know, we build this picture of the world from our vision and our taste and our touch and our smell. But there are other animals out there that

experience the world differently. They have like different senses that we just don't even experience and trying to imagine like what is it like to have another sense. It's like, trying to imagine what it's like to hear if you're deaf or what it's like to see something if you're blind. It feels like it's going to be impossible to capture. And there are animals out there that have senses that we don't have. For example, we know now that birds, when they migrate across the world, part of the way they find their way is by sensing the Earth's magnetic field. Like this is something they can experience internally. They don't have like little machines on their wrist with an arrow that they can like look at with their eyeballs.

They can innately sense the magnetic field of the earth. You know, most of the time, biology makes me feel just incredible joy. But this stuff really bums me out. What? Because, like, I was reading Ed Yong's, I think it's called This Immense World, and it's all about animal umwelt's and, like, the different ways they sense the world. And, you know, like, there are colors we don't see. There are flowers that are even more beautiful than we can appreciate.

And the insects can see. But we can't. And the idea that, you know, there's magnetic fields that I could see, but I'm missing it. It's amazing, but also I'm bummed out that I don't get to appreciate these extra colors and these magnetic fields. And anyway, okay, let's keep moving on. You know, I read that book as well, and I loved it for all the science of the ways that the animals sense the world. But I wish that he had dug deeper into that question. Like, what is it like to experience a magnetic field?

What is it like to see the world if you're a sea scallop or a spider with two different kinds of eyes? or to think about the world if you're an octopus with different kinds of brains partially distributed across your body. Maybe that's more philosophical than he wanted to get. But I wish he had dug deeper into that question. I think there's maybe no way for us to know without getting too philosophical. What is it like to be a bat? Nobody knows. I mean, because he was saying like, you know, are there apps that you could make so you could see the flowers, but you could detect like, okay, there's a pattern here that we can't see. But if there's a color we can't see, no app, could bring that color to life in a way that our eyes could pick up on.

Yeah, that's right. Because the color is an experience in your brain, it's generated in your mind, right? The photons are not red or green or blue or purple. They're just different energies and your brain creates that experience. Anyway, back to birds and their bird brains. Birds in their eyeballs have these weird proteins, and the proteins have electrons in them that have opposite quantum spin. Quantum spin is a property of an electron.

similar to spin mathematically and even physically it's similar because it's a kind of angular momentum, but it's also very, very weird. It's not like electrons are physically, literally spinning little balls. It's some other weird kind of spin that we call quantum spin. But you can think of it like electrons can either be spin up or spin down. And these protons have these pairs of electrons. And sometimes these electrons like to flip, like they're up and they're down, they're up and they're down. And the rate at which they flip and how often they're aligned with each other or not aligned, like are they pointing the same direction or are they pointing opposite direction? Depends on how strong the magnetic field is. So if you have a stronger magnetic field, the rate at which these

electrons flip their spin changes. So if you're like watching these electrons, you can sense and you can measure the strength of the magnetic field around you by looking at how fast the electrons spin is flipping. Is this specifically happening in their eyes or? There's a special kind of protein in their eye, which is triggered by light, weirdly, to have this property. It's like energized by light to get into this state where they can then sense the magnetic field, but then it sends that information along a different neural pathway.

So we don't really know, like, what is it like to be a bird? They're definitely getting this information. We don't know if they're literally seeing magnetic fields. when they look out on the world, is this part of their visual experience or if it's an overlay on top of their mental image the way like smell is or sound is for you. It doesn't augment your vision. It's like another dimension of experience. But we know they can definitely sense these magnetic fields directly. And it relies on the quantum properties of these electrons and the way they respond to magnetic fields.

Oh, man. It's so fun to think about what that might be like to be responding to magnetic fields. What does it like to see this in the universe, right? Like, I want to pick up every random bird and just interview it. Like, what's it like to be you, man? I'm not sure you're going to get the answers you're looking for. I think a lot of people have spent their career studying that question, and they're still working on it. They are still working on it. But this sense, which evolution is just like stumbled into this mechanism, again, relies on the quantum nature of the electron,

And without this quantum flipping probabilities and reaction to magnetic fields, it wouldn't be possible. I thought I had heard that turtles maybe also respond to magnetic fields. Is that right? Do turtles have the same system? They might. Turtles are pretty awesome. That's true. I know that fish have another sense that they can sense electric fields, though I'm not sure if there's a quantum nature to it.

But fish have this like other sense that we don't even have, you know, they can tell if there's electric fields. Basically, they could, like, see radio waves. Okay. All right. So you have now convinced me that this is important because we got to animal behavior and it mattered, even if it depresses me because I don't understand it. Okay, so what about, I had mentioned at the beginning mutations and how quantum stuff can mess up our biology.

Let's talk a bit more about that. How important is that? Yeah, exactly. We've been talking about the joy of experiencing the world in new ways. Let's bring it down and talk about cancer. But also sex, right? We'll talk about cancer and sex at the same time. Okay.

It's a little dark, but let's go for it. So the universe is raining down particles on us all the time. The space out there beyond our atmosphere is not actually empty. It's filled with tiny high energy particles. We call them cosmic rays. They're just like little protons or electrons or sometimes like iron nuclei flying through space. You can think of them like tiny little quantum meteors. Of death.

They totally are. And sometimes they smash into our atmosphere and they cause a little shower the way like if a rock hits the atmosphere at high speed, it's going to burn up and create a fireball, right? Same thing happens if a proton hits the atmosphere. It creates a shower of other particles. Some of those particles are muons, and the muons will make it all the way down to the ground and pass through your body. So right now, as you sit there, you're being inundated with muons from cosmic rays. These are little particles passing through your body. There's one per square centimeter per minute.

So it's not a huge rate. It's not like neutrinos, which are everywhere. But these particles are passing through your body. And sometimes they interact with your DNA, that crucial bit of your biology, damaging or flipping something to change the encodings and the instructions for life itself. You know, I knew that I could depend on you to get to a point where I would say, I can't let my kid listen to this episode either because then they'll be afraid of just sitting and reading books.

That will be a moment of existential dread. So there we are. You can't escape this. You can go underground in your bunker and you cannot escape muons. Muons can pass all the way through the earth. We just did a really fun episode about using muons to like see inside the Egyptian pyramids actually. But muons both cause death and joy.

Like muons can give you cancer because they can change your DNA and they can make a cell go crazy and start replicating out of control, boom, that's your cancer. The same way that like ultraviolet photons, when you sit on the beach without sunblock, can give you skin cancer. Mewons can pass into your body and they can give you cancer. But they can also sometimes make your kids super smart or super wonderful. If they hit some DNA in your reproductive system, the bits that you're going to pass on to

your kids, then they can change the DNA that you're going to pass on. So if you're like not very fast, they could like, flip a bit and change the encoding and your kids can be super duper fast or super duper smart or just super super different. And this actually turns out to be a crucial element of evolution. You know, my son is weirdly physically active for our family and he's super duper fit. Thank you, muons. Yeah, exactly. Muons add true quantum randomness to evolution. Evolution relies on exploring the space of possibilities, right? You need diversity. You need lots of different examples, some of which will survive and some of which will not, but you only get the ones that survive if you create them.

And so this element of randomness helps evolution create a big diversity of creators, some of which are going to make it and some of which are not. It really helps us explore the space of possibilities. And there's real quantum randomness there. And I think it's crucial to the reason we're even here. Wait a minute. When we talked about the reproductive system, was that the entire connection to sex or does it get better? No, that's it. Sorry. Oh, what a letdown. Sorry, I'm not going to give you the secrets to a quantum orgasm or anything like that. That's what I was waiting for. That's a billion-dollar idea.

I'm not just giving it away on the podcast. Okay, that's for my startup. Okay, well, and your startup's going to be called quantum biology, better living through something, something. All right, got it. But I think maybe the most intimate connection between quantum mechanics and biology is in our experience, isn't our decisions, isn't the choices we make about how to live our life. Am I going to work out this morning or am I going to have a donut? Am I going to take the bus today or drive my car? We seem to have this experience of free will.

We seem to be able to make these decisions. And, you know, decision making in the brain is very complicated. It's not something we understand. The brain is this whole set of neurons linked together in a very complicated, very nonlinear way. And what we don't know is if the brain is deterministic but chaotic, like difficult to describe, difficult to predict, because it's so complicated. The way, for example, if you take a brick out of a building and it collapses, that collapse is very complicated to describe, or like hurricanes are difficult to predict, even though they're

actually determined by everything that comes before them. Are the brains like that chaotic, difficult to describe, but actually deterministic? Or is there real randomness in there? Is the quantum nature somehow of the bits that make up our neurons generating randomness, which leads to like an avalanche, which affects? our decisions. Generally surprised by how often physics bleeds into philosophy and philosophy leads into physics. All right. So I like thinking about free will and how like pests and parasites impact our free will by like tinkering with our endocrine system. So you have my attention.

Tell me more about how quantum effects made me decide that this morning was a smoothie morning and not a bagel morning. Well, the short answer is we don't know, but we can speculate about it. And there's people on both sides of this argument. Some people think, no, it's impossible that all averages out. The quantum nature of the neuron is irrelevant. It doesn't matter. You could have built neurons out of classical objects, and they would work the same way. For example, Roger Penrose, famous physicist, and Daniel Dennett, famous philosopher of the mind.

They say, quote, most biologists think that quantum effects all just cancel out in the brain. There's no reason to think they're harnessed in any way. And so the argument there is like neurons are big, right? You know, even though they're built out of quantum objects, there's lots and lots of quantum objects, thousands and millions of these objects all acting together. And so even if one of them has a little quantum fluctuation here or there, it is going to get averaged out. It's not like an individual electron moving down the electron transport chain or a single

muon fluctuating to be here or there to hit you instead of somebody else. These are big things. They're made of lots of pieces. And so it all just averages out. That's a sort of conventional wisdom on how neurons work. But there's always someone willing to argue the opposite. And we don't know. We don't understand neurons well enough to say that it's impossible for quantum effects to influence their outcome.

Like neurons are built on avalanches. You have one which triggers another, which triggers another. It's possible that a tiny little avalanche can create a big one, right? Scott Aronson, one of my favorite writers on like quantum computing and philosophy, really a general smart guy and a polymath, he said brains seem balanced on a knife edge between order and chaos. Are they as orderly as a pendulum? Are they chaotic as the weather? We just don't know.

And so it's possible that neuronal networks are sort of balanced right between order and chaos. They're like they are sensitive to little quantum fluctuations, but just barely. He was in our house the other day and I could have talked to him about this. You met Scott Aronson? Yeah, he's a friend of ours. Oh my God. He is so smart. I love his blog.

Every time I'm skeptical about some quantum computing claim, I'm like, what does Scott have to say? Oh, yeah, it's devastating. Yeah, no, he's super smart, but I didn't know that we could be talking about the nature of free will. So thank you for fodder for the next time he's over. Well, these really are two sort of connected questions, but also very different. Like on one hand, we're asking, is there true randomness in the brain? And if there is randomness, it means that the brain is not deterministic, which means that, like, your predictions of whether you're going to get a smoothie or a donut are not determined. What's unclear is that whether that actually leaves any opening for free will, like if I tell you, okay, Kelly, you're not just an automaton. You're not just a mechanical robot that makes decisions based on what's happened to you and decisions you made previously. You're a random robot. You make random decisions. Is that any better? Does that leave you room for free will? It feels to me like, yeah, there's a gap there, but it doesn't explain like the subjective experience and how you're somehow controlling the outcome of physical processes, even if there's a gap.

random. So I think like randomness and determinism is separate from the question of free will. Yeah, I need a beer. So, so that the randomness, I feel like you could sort of predict my behaviors based on what I've done in the past, which makes me feel like randomness isn't dictating things, but is it just like randomness is tweaking the path I take a little bit as I go and over time it results in big changes or. Yeah, exactly. Because sometimes you are on a knife's edge. like why do you decide to take the bus or you know those moments of indecision how do you actually decide whether to go this way or that way or to do this or to do that and so it could be very subtly influencing you not in a way that you experience or understand could we study this yeah so

people are working to try to understand this by looking at individual neurons like let's study the neurons and see how predictable are they how sensitive are they to quantum fluctuations and then let's studying networks of neurons, like how predictable are their responses? If you give them the same inputs, are you going to always get the same outputs? Because it might be that this kind of thing emerges only when you have the combination of quantum randomness and a chaotic system. Like, you need a tiny little random thing, and then you need a system which is sensitive to a tiny little difference. You know, like a butterfly effect. Like if you blow a leaf this way versus that way, could you set off a hurricane or prevent a hurricane? You need a system that's sensitive to a

little fluctuation and then you need those fluctuations at the right point. So people are doing these experiments, but they're pretty hard. I mean, yeah, I can only imagine. Like even if you were just trying to study a simple organism like C. elegans, which has, you know, only a few handful of neurons and we know how they're connected. We know how they develop. But I can imagine like one corner of the petri dish is a little colder than the others. And that makes it hard to measure quantum effects. Exactly. That is the challenge. How do you exactly reproduce two circumstances? so that you know you're getting different outcomes with the same inputs.

There's a whole field of quantum mechanics, BOMian mechanics, it says it's impossible and that when we think we're getting different outcomes on quantum experiments, actually it's because the initial conditions were slightly different. And so this is a really big challenge. Okay, you have given me loads of material for my next few rounds of insomnia to think about.

Thank you for that. And I think that's enough for my brain today. I think the takeaway is that we don't really know if our quantum nature changes the experience of life and why you're having smoothies and while you're having donuts. But we do know that we wouldn't be here without quantum mechanics, without randomness affecting your DNA and the DNA of your ancestors, without electrons, quantum tunneling through those barriers, all these things that rely on quantum mechanics, we wouldn't be here. So in the end, we are all quantum wizards.

Oh, I like ending on a high note. We're all quantum wizards. That's good. Exactly. We all have a license to cackle our way through lives. Wow. All right. Thanks very much, everybody, for joining us on this quantum journey.

And thanks very much, Kelly, for indulging in this quantum adventure. Thank you for having me. It was a lot of fun as always. All right. I hope everybody fluctuates in having a very good week and tune in next time. For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Insta, and now TikTok.

Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeart Radio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now and about. backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth.

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