Life on the Edge Quotes

“Perhaps death represents the severing of the living organism's connection with the orderly quantum realm, leaving it powerless to resist the randomizing forces of thermodynamics.”
― Jim Al-Khalili, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“The Vikings could have been saved if they had borrowed survival strategies from the Inuit, but the only record we have of contact between the two peoples is the remark from a Viking settler that the Inuit bleed a lot when stabbed - an observation that hardly indicates a willingness to learn from their northern neighbors.”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“Enzymes have made and unmade every single biomolecule inside every living cell that lives or has ever lived. Enzymes are as close as anything to the vital factors of life. So the discovery that some, and possibly all, enzymes work by promoting the dematerialization of particles from one point in space and their instantaneous materialization in another provides us with a novel insight into the mystery of life. And while there remain many unresolved issues related to enzymes that need to be better understood, such as the role of protein motions, there is no doubt that quantum tunneling plays a role in the way they work. Even so, we should address a criticism made by many scientists who accept the findings of Klinman, Scrutton and others, but nevertheless claim that quantum effects have as relevant a role in biology as they have in the workings of a steam train: they are always there but are largely irrelevant to understanding how either system works. Their argument is often positioned within a debate about whether or not enzymes evolved to take advantage of quantum phenomena such as tunneling. The”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“In 1752, inspired by the mechanistic philosophy of René Descartes, the French scientist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur set out to investigate one of these supposed vital activities, digestion, with an ingenious experiment. It was generally believed at the time that animals digested their food by a mechanical process brought about by pounding and churning within their digestive organs. This theory seemed especially pertinent to birds, whose gizzards contained small stones that were thought to macerate their food—a mechanical action consistent with René Descartes’s view (outlined in the previous chapter) that animals were mere machines. But de Réaumur was puzzled by how birds of prey, whose gizzards lacked digestive stones, also managed to digest their food. So he fed his pet falcon small pieces of meat enclosed in tiny metal capsules punctured by small holes. When he recovered the capsules he discovered that the meat was completely digested, despite the fact that, protected within the metal, it could not have been subject to any mechanical action.”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“relatively small numbers of highly ordered particles, such as those inside a gene or the avian compass, can make a difference to an entire organism. This is what Jordan termed amplification and Schrödinger called order from order. The color of your eyes, the shape of your nose, aspects of your character, your level of intelligence and even your propensity to disease have in fact all been determined by precisely forty-six highly ordered supermolecules: the DNA chromosomes you inherited from your parents. No inanimate macroscopic object in the known universe has this sensitivity to the detailed structure of matter at its most fundamental level—a level where quantum mechanical rather than classical laws reign.”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“This process by which random molecular motion disrupts carefully aligned quantum mechanical systems is known as decoherence, and it rapidly wipes out the weird quantum effects in big inanimate objects. Raising the temperature of a body increases the energy and speed of molecular jostling, so decoherence occurs more readily at higher temperatures. But do not think that “higher” means hot. In fact, even at room temperature decoherence is almost instantaneous. This is why the idea that warm living bodies could maintain delicate quantum states was, at least initially, considered to be highly implausible. Only when objects are cooled to near absolute zero—a temperature of −273°C—is random molecular motion completely stilled to keep decoherence at bay, allowing quantum mechanics to shine through.”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“the principal reason why many scientists were (and many still are) very skeptical toward the notion that the avian compass could be governed by quantum mechanics. You may remember that, when discussing this issue in chapter 1, we described the quantum properties of matter as being “washed away” by the random arrangement of molecules in big objects. With our thermodynamic insight we can now see the source of that dissipation: it is the billiard-ball-like molecular jostling that Schrödinger identified as the source of the “order from disorder” statistical laws. Scattered particles can be realigned to reveal their hidden quantum depths, but only in special circumstances and usually only very briefly.”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“Much of the skepticism Schrödinger’s claim attracted at the time was rooted in the general belief that delicate quantum states couldn’t possibly survive in the warm, wet and busy molecular environments inside living organisms”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“heredity was based on the novel principle of “order from order.” He first presented this theory at a series of lectures at Trinity College in Dublin in 1943 and published them the following year in What Is Life?, in which he wrote: “The living organism seems to be a macroscopic system which in part of its behavior approaches to that … to which all systems tend, as the temperature approaches the absolute zero and the molecular disorder is removed.” For reasons that we will soon discover, at absolute zero all objects are subject to quantum rather than thermodynamic laws. Life, Schrödinger was claiming, is a quantum-level phenomenon capable of flying in the air, walking on two or four legs, swimming in the ocean, growing in the soil or, indeed, reading this book.”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“it was known that genes could be faithfully transmitted with mutation rates (errors) of less than one in one billion. This extraordinary high degree of fidelity convinced Schrödinger that the laws of heredity could not be founded on the “order from disorder” classical laws. Instead, he proposed that genes were more like individual atoms or molecules in being subject to the nonclassical but strangely orderly rules of the science he helped to found, quantum mechanics.”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“Quantum mechanics is normal. It is the world it describes that is weird.”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“Of course, any scenario involving quantum mechanics in the origin of life three billion years ago remains highly speculative. But, as we have discussed, even classical explanations of life’s origin are beset with problems: it isn’t easy to make life from scratch!”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“The problem with using gunk as the starting material for generating organized life is that the random thermodynamic forces that were available in the primordial earth—the billiard-ball-like molecular motions that we discussed in chapter 2—tend to destroy order rather than create it.”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“The finding clearly demonstrated that the earth had liquid warm oceans not long after its formation,*1 with mud volcanoes (figure 9.2) bubbling out of hydrothermal vents at the bottom of a shallow sea.”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“there is in fact no evidence that quantum mechanics is actually needed at all to account for consciousness—unlike other biological phenomena that we have considered in this book such as enzyme action or photosynthesis.”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“experiments carried out in several laboratories have recently demonstrated that external EM fields, of similar strength and structure to those that the brain itself generates, do indeed influence nerve firing.16 In fact, what the field seems to do is to coordinate nerve firing: that is, bring lots of neurons into synchrony so that they all fire together. The findings suggest that the brain’s own EM field, generated by nerve firing, also influences nerve firing, providing a kind of self-referencing loop that many theorists argue is an essential component of consciousness.17”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“Einstein’s equation, E = mc2, with energy on one side and mass on the other, famously demonstrated that energy and matter are interchangeable. So the brain’s EM energy field—the left-hand side of Einstein’s equation—is just as real as the matter that makes up its neurons; and, because it is generated by neuron firing, it encodes exactly the same information as the neural firing patterns of the brain. However, whereas neuronal information remains trapped in those blipping neurons, the electrical activity generated by all the blipping unifies all the information within the brain’s EM field.”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“Schrödinger’s seventy-year-old insight that the kinds of living system that are likely to support quantum rules will involve small numbers of particles.”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“entanglement is a quantum step up from coherence whereby quantum particles lose their individuality, so that what happens to one affects them all, instantaneously.”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“Perhaps the oddest fact we know about the universe is that we know a great deal about it,”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“The substance of a tree is carbon and where did that come from? That comes from the air; it’s carbon dioxide from the air. People look at trees and they think it [the substance of the tree] comes out of the ground; plants grow out of the ground. But if you ask “where does the substance come from” you find out … the trees come out of the air … the carbon dioxide and the air goes into the tree and it changes it, kicking out the oxygen.… We know that the oxygen and carbon [in carbon dioxide] stick together very tight … how does the tree manage to undo that so easily? … It is the sunlight that comes down and knocks this oxygen away from the carbon … leaving the carbon, and water, to make the substance of the tree! RICHARD FEYNMAN”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“When chemists artificially produce an amino acid or a sugar they almost always synthesize only a single product at a time, which they manage by carefully controlling the experimental conditions for the selected reaction, such as temperature and the concentrations of the various ingredients, to optimize the synthesis of their target compound. This is not an easy task and requires careful control of many different conditions inside customized flasks, condensers, separation columns, filtration devices and other elaborate chemical apparatus. Yet every living cell in your body is continually synthesizing thousands of distinct biochemicals within a reaction chamber filled with just a few millionths of a microliter of fluid.*7 How do all those diverse reactions proceed concurrently? And how is all this molecular action orchestrated within a microscopic cell? These questions are the focus of the new science of systems biology; but it is fair to say that the answers remain mysterious!”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“The important point is that the singular object that is the balloon strictly obeys the gas law because the orderly motion of its single continuous elastic surface arises from the disorderly motions of very large numbers of particles, generating, as Schrödinger put it, order from disorder.”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“Life appears to have one foot in the classical world of everyday objects and the other planted in the strange and peculiar depths of the quantum world. Life, we will argue, lives on the quantum edge.”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“between the quantum and classical worlds, the quantum edge, where we, as you will have guessed from the title of this book, are claiming life also lies.”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“So, could the solution to the mystery of how birds find their way around the globe lead to a revolution in biology? The”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“All atomic nuclei are composed of two types of particles: protons and their electrically neutral partners, neutrons. If a nucleus has too many of one type or the other, then the rules of quantum mechanics dictate that the balance has to be redressed and those excess particles will change into the other form: protons will become neutrons, or neutrons protons, via a process called beta-decay. This is precisely what happens when two protons come together: a composite of two protons cannot exist and one of them will beta-decay into a neutron. The remaining proton and the newly transformed neutron can then bind together to form an object called a deuteron (the nucleus of an atom of the heavy hydrogen isotopefn3 called deuterium), after which further nuclear reactions enable the building of the more complex nuclei of other elements heavier than hydrogen, from helium (with two protons and either one or two neutrons) through to carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and so on. The key point is that the deuteron owes its existence to its ability to exist in two states simultaneously, by virtue of quantum superposition. This is because the proton and neutron can stick together in two different ways that are distinguished by how they spin. We will see later how this concept of ‘quantum spin’ is actually very different from the familiar spin of a big object, such as a tennis ball; but for now we will go with our classical intuition of a spinning particle and imagine both the proton and the neutron spinning together within the deuteron in a carefully choreographed combination of a slow, intimate waltz and a faster jive. It was discovered back in the late 1930s that within the deuteron these two particles are not dancing together in either one or the other of these two states, but in both states at the same time – they are in a blur of waltz and jive simultaneously – and it is this that enables them to bind together.fn4 An obvious response to this statement is: ‘How do we know?’ Surely, atomic nuclei are far too small to be seen, so might it not be more reasonable to assume that there is something missing in our understanding of nuclear forces? The answer is no, for it has been confirmed in many laboratories over and over again that if the proton and neutron were performing the equivalent of either a quantum waltz or a quantum jive, then the nuclear ‘glue’ between them would not be quite strong enough to bind them together; it is only when these two states are superimposed on top of each other – the two realities existing at the same time – that the binding force is strong enough. Think of the two superposed realities as a little like mixing two coloured paints, blue and yellow, to make a combined resultant colour, green. Although you know the green is made up of the two primary constituent colours, it is neither one nor the other. And different ratios of blue and yellow will make different shades of green. Likewise, the deuteron binds when the proton and neutron are mostly locked in a waltz, with just a tiny amount of jive thrown in. So”
― Jim Al-Khalili, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“The advantage of a quantum walk over a classical random walk can be appreciated by returning to our slow-moving drunk and imagining that the bar he leaves has sprung a leak and that water is pouring out of its door.”
― Jim Al-Khalili, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“Rennet”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology