Quantum Physics: The Laws That Govern Our Universe [4K] | The Secrets of Quantum Physics | Spark

there is a way to make an entrance to my destiny now it was a witches conspiracy download vili today beneath the complexities of everyday life the rules of our

universe

seem reassuringly simple this solid bridge supports my weight the water that flows beneath always goes downhill and when I throw it This Stone always flies through the air following a predictable path, but when scientists looked deeply into the tiny blocks of matter that make up matter, all that certainty disappeared, they found the strange world of

quantum

mechanics, deep inside From everything we see around us, we find a completely different

universe

. ours, paraphrasing one of the founders of

quantum

mechanics, everything we call real is made up of things that cannot be considered real in themselves.

Years ago, some of the world's greatest scientists began a trip down the rabbit hole into the strange and bizarre that discovered that in the realm of very small things they can be in two places at once, that their destinies are dictated by chance and that reality itself defies all common sense and it is at stake that everything we thought we knew about the world could turn out to be completely false. wrong, the story of our descent into scientific madness begins with the most unlikely object Berlin 1890. Germany is a new country recently unified and hungry to industrialize in this newly unified Germany a series of new engineering companies were founded that had spent millions on buy the European patent.

For Edison's new invention, the light bulb, the light bulb was the epitome of modern technology, a great optimistic symbol of progress. Engineering firms quickly realized that fortunes could be made building streetlights for the new German Empire, but what they didn't realize was that it would also

spark

a scientific revolution. Oddly enough, this humble object is responsible for the birth of the most important theory in all of science, quantum mechanics, a theory that I have spent my life studying and that is because back in 1900 the light bulb presented quite a strange problem. Engineers knew that if you heated the filament with electricity glowed, although the

physics

behind this was completely unknown, something as basic as the relationship between the temperature of the filament and the color of the light it produces was still a complete mystery a mystery they were obviously interested in solving it and with the help of the new German state saw how to get ahead of their competitors in 1887 the German

govern

ment invested millions in a new technical research institute here in Berlin the Russian physicalist technician begins or PTR then in 1900 they recruited a brilliant, if somewhat unorthodox, scientist to help work here.

His name was Max Planck. Planck took on a deceptively simple problem of why the color of light changes as the filament heats up. I forgot the feeling of the puzzle in front of the board. I'm going to ride this bike with an old lamp powered by an old dynamo. Obviously, the faster I go, the brighter the light, the more I pedal, the more electricity the dynamo produces, the hotter the lamp filament and the brighter the light. but the light Bold produces not only gets brighter, it also changes color as I speed up the color changes from red to orange to yellow at this time.

I'm really going to intensify it now that the filament of the bulbs does it, but although it certainly gets brighter. the color seems to stay the same yellow white strange why doesn't the light make Bluer investigate? Plank and his colleagues built this, a blackbody radiator, it's a special tube that they could heat to a very precise temperature and a way to measure color. or frequency of light. Produced today, more than a hundred years later, the PTR still performs exactly this type of measurement, only with much more precision. The indoor temperature here is 841 degrees Celsius. Feel the heat coming out and glowing a beautiful orange-red color. the same color as the light on my bicycle when I ride my bike slowly I want to see something even hotter the temperature in here is about 2000 degrees Celsius and it shines with a much brighter and whiter colored light it produces light of this intensity and the color It requires a power of about 40 kilowatts now, that is equivalent to about 400 meters on a bicycle riding very fast or the combined power of the entire Tour de France, although the light is whiter, it is red, white, there is very little blue, is it? why it is much more difficult to make blue than red and higher up on the spectrum Beyond blue, the so-called ultraviolet hardly occurs, even when we look at things as hot as the sun, even the Sun at a temperature of five thousand five hundred degrees Celsius produces mostly white visible light and produces remarkably little UV light, given how hot it is, why is UV light so difficult to make?

A remarkable failure of common sense so perplexed scientists of the late 19th century that they gave it a very dramatic name, called the ultraviolet catastrophe plank, had a crucial first step. One step toward solving this found the precise mathematical link between the color of light, its frequency, and its energy, but he didn't understand the connection. However, it was another strange anomaly that would really put the cat among the pigeons in the late 19th century. studying their newly discovered radio waves and how they were transmitted and to do so they were building experimental equipment very similar to this, basically spinning this disk that could generate enormous voltages that caused Sparks to jump through the space between the two metal spheres, but In doing so, they discovered something very unexpected that had to do with light.

They discovered that by illuminating the Spheres with a powerful light source, they could make the Sparks jump more easily. This suggested a mysterious and inexplicable connection between light and electricity. Scientists need to understand what was happening. use this, it's called a gold leaf electroscope, it's basically a more sensitive version of the

spark

discharge apparatus. Now, first of all, I have to charge it. What I'm doing is adding excess electrons that are separating the two gold sheets first. I take a red light and shine it on the surface of the metal and nothing happens, even if I increase the brightness of the light, the gold leaves are not affected.

Now I will try this special ultraviolet-rich blue light immediately, the golden leaves collapse, the light can clearly. removing the static electrical charge from the leaves can somehow remove the electrons I added to them, but why is UV light so much better at doing this than red light? This new puzzle became known as the photoelectric effect. The ultraviolet catastrophe and the photoelectric effect were large. problems for physicists because neither could be understood using the best science of the time, the science that said quite unequivocally that light was a wave around us, we see light behaving in a perfectly common sense wavy way, look at the shadow of my hand, it's blurry around the edges, we understand this as light hitting the sides of my hand and bending and blurring slightly, like water ripples around an obstruction.

Perfect behavior like a wave of common sense and here's something else, something quite beautiful, look at these soap bubbles, light them up. and magnificent patterns of colors emerge from nowhere and this is easily explained if you accept that light was a wave that reflected from the outer and inner layers of the thin soap film and broke into rainbow colors, like waves. on the surface of the water light. They were simply waves of energy spreading through space and this was as firmly accepted as the fact that the Earth was round, but although this wave theory worked perfectly well for shadows and bubbles, when the ultraviolet catastrophe and the effect photoelectric, the wheels began to come off.

The problem was this, how could light do this to really understand how absurd this phenomenon was? It might be useful to consider how waves behave correctly in water. This is the wave tank at rnlise headquarters in Dorset, it is used to train lifeboat teams to deal with them. a range of different types of water waves, first small waves only 30 centimeters high, these waves do not have much energy, just enough to hit this upper hand with the other, but when the waves grow to more than a meter and medium is very different. Proposition: it is clear what water waves tell us.

Bigger waves, more intense, have more power, they easily knocked me and the cans over, so if light was a wave, more intensity should knock out more electrons, that's not what happened, remember, no matter how intense be the red light. It still didn't separate the electrons from the metal, but the strangely weak ultraviolet rays worked in a matter of seconds, so thinking of light as a wave just didn't add up well to solve this, someone needed to think the unthinkable and in 1905 someone did. You may have heard it. his name was Albert Einstein this is the Aachenhold Sternvark Observatory in Berlin perched on top it is a huge and strange construction of iron and steel but it is not a weapon it is actually a telescope built abroad in 1896 the telescope was one of the greatest of his kind in Albert Einstein gave a very famous public lecture here on his theory of relativity, which is of course what he is most famous for, but it is not the paper he won.

He awarded her the Nobel Prize in 1905. He also devised a new theory to explain the photoelectric effect. What he suggested was revolutionary and even heretical. He argued that we have to completely forget about the idea that light is a wave and think about it. like a stream of small bullet-like particles, the term he used to describe a particle of light was a quantum. For Einstein, a quantum was a small mass of energy, and although the word was not new in 1905, the idea that light could be a quantum. It seemed crazy to follow Einstein's heretical line of thought to its logical conclusion.

He solved all the problems with light in one fell swoop. I will try to explain how this helps using a rough analogy, of course like all analogies it is far from perfect, but I hope it is. give you a taste of

physics

to help you understand why thinking of light as a stream of particles solves the mystery of the photoelectric effect in this analogy, these red balls represent Einstein's light quanta and those cans over there are the electricity contained now in metal. In the original experiment they made electricity flow from the surface of the metal by shining a light on it.

In my analogy, I'm going to try to knock down those cans using these red balls, absolutely no effect, it's like red light according to Einstein each. A red light particle carries very little energy because red light has a low frequency, so even a very bright red light with many red light particles cannot dislodge any electrons from the metal plate, just like red balls. . Now I'm going to use heavier ones. balls like these blue golf balls and I'm going to try to knock down the cans with these weird lights in the experiment. Now each individual light particle carries more energy because UV light has a higher frequency, only some of them are like dim UV light.

They are enough to knock the electrons out of the metal plate and collapse the gold foil, so Einstein's idea that light is made up of tiny particles or quanta is a wonderful explanation of the photoelectric effect. I remember when I first heard about this, when Sheer blew me away. Elegance and simplicity, but what's more, Einstein's ingenious idea, all to help solve Planck's mystery about the light bulb. There was more red than ultraviolet because ultraviolet quanta required much more energy to produce a hundred times more energy, no wonder there were so few of them that The moment at the beginning of the 20th century marked a genuine revolution because it demonstrated that the type of physical science that people were doing since Newton and LaPlace and people like that, that a completely new approach was needed, physics has never recovered from that moment in the sense that it was built from that moment is where modern physics really began , but Einstein's theory also left physicists with a dizzying paradox that defied all common sense.

Light was definitely a wave that explained the shadows and bubbles and now it was definitely a particle too. Einstein's quanta that explain the photoelectric effect and the ultraviolet catastrophe, just a few years after Einstein's brilliant and crazy idea, the paradox became much deeper and much stranger because what seemed to be a curious mystery about light was about to become a battlefield, but the nature of reality itself 1922 the Western world is in the grip of a revolution a cultural revolution James Joyce's Ulysses is publishedStravinsky is at the peak of his powers and Chaplin has just released his first serious film the collapse of the Ottoman Empire Europe is still recovering from the war to end o Wars in which millions of men lost their lives Russia is newly communist while the United States export jazz to the world thanks in the arts politics literature economics there was an insatiable appetite for change this was the birth of modernism you have a heart that there is no way to know you can see where you are but you can't see where you are going and I'm still stuck here I'm entangled with you this whole world may be so unsaid but and I could get in trouble for saying this I would say. that the upheaval taking place in physics at that time would eclipse them all and have far more lasting consequences had begun with the discovery of the strange and contradictory wave and particle nature of light and ended as an epic battle waged between the greatest minds. great and science for the highest possible At stake is the nature of reality itself on the one hand a new wave of modernist revolutionary scientists and their leader the brilliant Danish physicist Niels Bohr on the other hand the voice of reason Albert Einstein at his peak of his powers he is now world famous a formidable adversary, the battle raged for decades, actually in some ways it still does, it was fought all over the world in universities, at lectures in bars and cafes, it would make grown men cry and it began with To produce electricity in the mid-1920s, an experiment was carried out at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, in the United States, which discovered something completely unexpected about electrons.

At that time it was accepted without a doubt that electrons were small pieces of matter, small particles but solid like miniature particles. billiard balls in the experiment shot a beam of electrons at a crystal and watched them disperse, that is completely equivalent to taking a beam of electrons, say, from an electron gun and shooting it at a screen with two slits for the electrons to pass. through the slits and hit another screen in the back, what Bell's science discovered shocked the physics world to its core to understand why to consider a similar experiment with water waves.

I have set up a simple experiment. I have a water wave tank placed on top. of an overhead projector I have a generator that produces waves that pass through two narrow spaces. The projector projects the image of the waves on the back wall. You can see how the waves come in from the left and filter through the two spaces that extend on the other side and interfere with each other, what this means is that when the crest of one wave meets the crest of another , they add up to form a higher wave, but when the crest of one meets a trough, they cancel, giving rise to these characteristic lines that lead to the characteristic wave pattern, bands of light and darkness, each time.

You see these light and dark bands, the characteristic wave pattern, you know without a doubt that you have wave-like behavior, so guess what they saw in New Jersey now it looked like By shooting electrons, small solid particles through the two spaces produced exactly the same type of pattern of light and dark bands. It was discovered that the first light long believed to be a wave sometimes behaved like particles and now electrons were long believed to be particles. They behaved like waves, but it was actually stranger than that. The wave pattern was not simply the result of the entire electron beam.

More recently, this experiment has been repeated in laboratories around the world by shooting one electron at a time through the slits toward the surface. At first, each electron appears to land randomly on the screen, a characteristic wave pattern. Let me be quite clear about how strange this is. Remember from the wave tank experiment where the characteristic wave pattern only exists because each wave passes through both slits and then two pieces interfere with each other, but here each individual electron, each particle passes alone through the slits before reach the screen and yet each electron continues to contribute to the characteristic wave pattern, each electron can behave like a wave to explain this strange result Niels Bohr and his colleagues created quantum mechanics, the crazy theory of light and matter who embraced contradiction and did not care that it was almost impossible to understand, as Niels Bohr himself said.

Anyone who is not surprised by quantum theory has not understood it. So viewers, I'm going to take our little electron and use it to delve into the heart of reality and yes, prepare to be amazed because this is the only way to explain what we observe when a single electron travels through the slits and hits the la Screen quantum mechanics says this, we can't describe what travels as a physical object, the only thing we can talk about is the possibilities of where the electron could be. This random wave somehow travels through both slits producing interference like the water wave when it hits. the screen what was just the ghostly possibility of an electron mysteriously becomes real let me try to capture how strange this is with an analogy if I spin this coin and then the whole time it spins it's blurry I can't tell if it's heads or tails but If I stop him, I force him to decide and it comes up heads, so before it was neither heads nor tails, but a mix of both, but as soon as I stopped him, I forced him to make a decision.

What Boar and his supporters claimed was happening to our electrons in some sense, as the coin spins, is heads and tails. Similarly, the chance wave of electrons passes through both slits by two paths at the same time, our coin then stops on the face, the ethereal wave of probability reaches the screen and only then becomes a particle the quantum world was like nothing ever seen before it's hard to overstate how crazy this ball is effectively claiming that you can never really know where the electron is until you measure it and it's not only that you don't know where the electron is, it's strange that the electron itself was everywhere at the same time.

Keep in mind that electrons are among the most common and basic building blocks of reality, and yet here's Bohr saying that only by looking can we actually conjure their position into existence - it's like there's a curtain between us and the world. quantum world and behind it there is no solid reality only the potential for reality things only become real when we pull back the curtain and look and this you ladies and gentlemen made yourselves known No matter how persuasive the Copenhagen interpretation may seem , many people could not stand Niels's extravagant ideas and found a natural leader in the most powerful man in science.

Albert Einstein hated this interpretation with every fiber of his being and famously said: Does the moon cease? exist when I don't look at it I was very unhappy because it gave limits to knowledge that I didn't think should be definitive I thought there should be a better underlying theory For the next 10 years Einstein and Ball would argue passionately about whether quantum mechanics meant giving up on reality or not So, with two other scientists, Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolski, Einstein thought they had found a way to win the argument. He was convinced he had found a fatal flaw in Copenhagen's interpretation and his claim that reality was summoned into existence by the act of looking at it.

At the heart of Einstein's argument was an aspect of quantum mechanics called entanglement (now entanglement is this). incredibly close special relationship between a pair of quantum particles whose fates are intertwined, for example, if they were created in the same event, they try to explain this by imagining that the two particles are spinning coins. Imagine that you are two electrons created from the same event and then separated. Quantum mechanics says that because they were created together, they are entangled and now many. of their properties are forever linked wherever they are, remember that the Copenhagen interpretation says that until one of the coins is measured, none of them are heads or tails, in fact, heads and tails do not even exist and this is where the Interlocking makes this strange situation even more strange when we stop the first coin and it becomes heads because the coins are interlocked, the second coin simultaneously will become tails and here is the crucial thing.

I can't predict what the result of my measurement will be, only that they will always be on the opposite side. Einstein seized on this because it meant that something was happening between the two coins, almost too crazy to imagine, it's as if the two coins were secretly communicating, communicating instantly across space and time, even if the First Column was in the Earth and the other on Pluto, Einstein refused. To believe this instantaneous faster than light communication, his theory of relativity said that nothing could travel that fast, not even information, so how could one coin instantly know how the other would land?

He disparagingly called it creepy action at a distance and claimed it was a fatal flaw. In the Copenhagen interpretation, moreover, he had a better idea. Einstein believed there was a simpler interpretation that somehow the fate of the two coins, whether or not they ended up heads or tails, was already fixed long before we observed them, he said that although it looked like the coin was deciding to be, say, face at the time of observation, in reality, that decision was made long before it was simply hidden from us in Einstein's mind. Quantum particles were nothing like spinning coins, they were more like, say, a pair of gloves separated left and right in boxes.

We don't know which box contains which glove until we open one, but when we do and find, say, a right-handed glove, we immediately know that the other box contains the left-handed glove, but more importantly, this doesn't require any scary action. from distance. none of the gloves have been altered by the act of observation. They were both right or left handed gloves from the beginning and the only thing that has changed is our knowledge, so it is the true description of reality. The boar coins that only become real when you look at them and then magically communicate with each other or the Einstein gloves that are hidden from us but are definitely on the left or right from the beginning, in other words, is there an objective reality? as Einstein believed or not as the boar maintained in the late 1930s as the world? immersed in war there was no way to answer this question the battle to understand the nature of reality was at a standstill the war spread throughout Europe and many of the leading scientists fled to the United States at the time when the second world war was underway inexorably into the Cold War Science backed by dollar bills and a new vision of the future flourished.

Remember that after the war, visitors came back eager to go and try to apply the ideas of quantum theory to atoms, the interaction between electrons and light, and what didn't they do? You need to care about the philosophical side of things to advance that, so as you say, it really took a backseat. Quantum mechanics led to a deep understanding of semiconductors that helped create the modern electronic era. He produced lasers that revolutionized communications. Impressive new medical advances. In the field of nuclear energy, quantum mechanics was so successful that most working physicists deliberately chose to ignore Einstein's objections;

They just didn't care because it worked; They even coined a phrase to describe it: shut up and calculate, and the price of this success was that Boren Einstein The debate about the reality of the quantum world was simply swept under the rug and, in the midst of all this success and pragmatism, there were few who They still cared about what it all meant, but as the '50s moved headlong into the '60s, a single dissident found a way to resolve the argument. Once and for all, I think it's fair to say that John Bell is not well known to the general public, but to physicists like me he is a hero, he was an original thinker with real courage in his convictions and the story of his rise. until you become one.

The story of physics greats becomes even more remarkable when you consider how it began. He was born in Belfast in the 1920s to a poor working class family. His father was a horse trader and they really fought for him to study at Queen's University in Belfast. Physics, in fact, he was the only one in his family who even finished school, which I think he did.insatiably curious, fiery and stubborn. I remember meeting John Bell in 1989, a year before he died, we were both at a conference in the United States and we happened to be sharing an elevator just after they were both attending a talk on quantum mechanics.

Eager to say something to the great John Bell. Said. I thought the speaker's conclusions were completely crazy. He looked at me with his piercing blue eyes and for a moment I thought he was my rookie. The physics major was going down the drain, but when the elevator doors opened and he was about to leave, he said yes. I completely agree with you. Haven't you heard about the helium problem until today? I'm not really sure what the problem is with helium. but I was so relieved that John Bell and I agreed for many years that he worked here at Britain's Atomic Energy Research Center at Harwell, who built this first experimental nuclear reactor called Dido.

It was here that he began to reflect on the deep and troubling questions raised by quantum mechanics. He posed the question of whether the quantum world only existed when it was observed or was there a deeper truth waiting to be discovered. In fact, he was so worried that he began to wonder if there was a problem at the heart of quantum mechanics. He famously said: I hesitate to do it. I think it might be wrong, but I know it's rotten, which is why in the early 1960s Bell decided to try to solve the crisis at the heart of quantum physics;

After all, it was an epic challenge, how can you check if something is real, if something is? Isn't everything there without looking? How do you look behind the curtain without opening it? John Bell came up with a brilliant way to do exactly that. I think this is one of the most ingenious ideas in all of physics; Without a doubt, one of the It is the most difficult thing to understand and explain, but I am going to try to try and yes, I am afraid that this time I am going to use another analogy. I'm going to play a card game, but it's one of the highest possible.

The nature of reality itself is at stake, the card game is against a mysterious Quantum dealer, the cards he deals represent subatomic particles or even quanta of light photons and the game we will play will ultimately tell us if Einstein or the ball were at this point the rules of the game are deceptively simple the dealer is going to deal two cards face down if they are the same color I win if they are different colors I lose so I have a red so I need another red to win which is black I lose again on the opposite side colors I have lost the two, the ones that are four in a row, the six pairs in a row, the ones that I have lost.

Well, I think I know what the deal is doing here. Clearly, the platform has been rigged beforehand so that each pair comes out opposite. colors, but there is an easy way to surprise the dealer, so what we can do now is change the rules of the game this time, if they are the opposite color, I win, but once again, every time my evil opponent Quantum beats me .but again I can see what the karate dealer could have done, maybe while I wasn't looking he changed the package and fixed it so that it always lands in his favor now, if the repair is the same color, the mounted covers remember which were what Einstein thought they were.

It really happened in the interlocking experiment, he said that just like the gloves were already placed in the box, the evil dealer stacked the cards before we played, but the idea of ​​Neil's Boar was very different, he said that the red and the black They don't even exist until you spin them. The best thing about Bella's genius was that she came up with a way to decide once and for all who was right, Einstein or the boar, that's how she did it. Now I'm not going to tell the dealer what game I want to play, he wins with the same color or a different one.

The color wins until he has dealt the cards now because he can never predict what rules I am going to play by. He can never stack the deck correctly. He now he can't win. Can he do it? Now the rules are different. He earns the same. Alright. The same color. win this gets to the heart of Belle's idea if now we start playing and I win as many as I lose then Einstein was right the dealer is just a trickster with a gift for sleight of hand reality may be complicated but he has a purpose existence, does he? what happens if I lose?

So I am forced to admit that there is no sensible explanation. The card must be sending secret signals to the other through space and time defying everything we know. I am forced to accept that at the fundamental quantum level. reality is truly unknowable Bell reduced this idea to a single mathematical equation that tells us once and for all what seemed incontestable what reality really is. John Bell published his idea in 1964 and the extraordinary thing is that at that time the entire physics community he ignored it total radio silence, it seems the world just wasn't ready, maybe it was because his equation seemed impossible to test or simply because no one thought it was worth investigating, but that was about to change and the change would come from a place very unexpected: the United States was in crisis due to Watergate in Vietnam. feminism the Black Panthers and while all this was happening a small group of hippie physicists worked at the University of Berkeley in California they did all the hippie things they smoked drugs they took LSD they debated things like Buddhism and telepathy and they loved quantum mechanics in its strange version of reality they saw parallels with their own esoteric beliefs foreign-style physics also caught the attention of the public who read their crazy hippie books that mixed quantum mechanics with eastern mysticism books like The Tower of Physics the Woolly Dancing Masters and my personal favorite space-time and beyond towards an explanation of the inexplicable but most important to our history the history of quantum mechanics these hippie physicists also turn their attention to Einstein's now famous thought experiment and what it told us about the nature of reality who saw Niels Bohr's secret signaling as proof that physics supported their own ideas because if two particles could eerily communicate across space, then ESP telepathy and clairvoyance were probably true too, only they could prove it really existed;

Then, in 1972, they realized that with a little mathematical sleight of hand. They were able to take Bell's equation and test it experimentally. One of his group, John Clauser, borrowed some equipment from the laboratory he was working in and organized the first genuine and definitive test of quantum mechanics. This is an image of that first experiment built with leftovers and stolen objects. The equipment over the next few years was improved by a team led by Alan Aspecto in Paris, making their results more reliable. More than 10 years after Bell first proposed his equation, it could finally be put to the test.

This is a modern version of the experiment performed for the first time. discovered by John Clauser and then Alan look here a crystal converts laser lights into pairs of intertwined light quanta forming two very precise beams these photons pass around and bend again until they pass through these detectors the two photons are like the two cards that The Evil Dealer places in front of me, we will measure a property of photons called polarization, which is equivalent to the color of the cards in my game, so, for example, winning with two matching red cards could be the same as two photons. with equal polarization. but because this is quantum mechanics, it's more complicated than my simple card game and these dials here also allow me to measure a second property of photons, that amounts to me not just trying to guess the color of the face of the cards but I'm also trying to guess the color of the back of the cards.

Okay, now let's turn on the laser and start the experiment. This number here gives me the number of pairs of photons that go through the experiment and which is equivalent to the pairs of cards. In my game, the graph here gives me the probability that I can win. I'm right, the more photons, the more precise it becomes. I'll stop at an uncertainty of about one percent and the final answer is 0.56, so if I put that in my equation I now need to run The Experiment three more times corresponding to the four different settings of these dials, each run is now like a different set of rules for the quantum distributor and when I add them up and get the answer if it is less than two then Einstein was right, if it is greater than 2 then the ball was right, so now for the second configuration, remember what the experiment will show.

If the numbers come up less than two, then it is proof that the dealer has been stacking the deck. This was from Einstein. see ok so the number I get this time is 0.82 now it resets for run three but if the result is greater than two then the deck can't be stacked and something else is working fine so the result of run 3 is minus 0.59 and finally run 4. This last number will finally reveal whether the world follows common sense, something much stranger. Well, our final result is 0.56, so if we turn the laser off properly, it better solve the answer and there we have it. 2.53 is a number. greater than two absolute proofs that Albert Einstein was wrong and Neil's ball was right the importance of this result is simply enormous just remember what Einstein's version of reality means cannot be true no amount of clever poker games with our experiment can fool nature the two entangled The properties of photons could not have been established from the beginning, but they come into existence only when we measure them.

Something strange is uniting them across space. Something that we cannot explain or even imagine except through the use of mathematics. And the strangest futons only become real when we look at them in some strange sense it really suggests that the moon does not exist when we are not looking it really defies common sense no wonder that towards the end of his life Einstein wrote that all these 50 years of conscious reflection have not brought me any closer to the question, what are quanta like? Every Tom Dick and Harry thinks they know, that they are wrong, the experiment only confirms this, whatever happens, we just don't understand it, but that It doesn't mean we should stop looking, while it is true that Einstein's dream of finding a reasonable common sense explanation was shattered forever.

My personal opinion is that this does not necessarily eliminate physical reality like Einstein. I still believe there could be a more acceptable explanation underlying the strange results of quantum mechanics, but one thing is clear. If there are spooky physical connections if parallel universes exist if we bring reality into existence by looking at whatever the truth is the weirdness of the quantum world won't go away it will rear its ugly head somewhere 120 years ago the biggest scientific revolution in history was sparked by a light bulb and scientists are still using powerful light sources like x-rays to unlock the mysteries of nature.

This is the diamond light source. It is the largest scientific facility in Britain. The X-rays produced here are 10 billion times more powerful than a hospital. X-rays with that kind of power, scientists can cut through matter and glimpse those quantum

secrets

inside. Researchers here are using this powerful beam of light to investigate new materials that may have the potential to make a breakthrough in electronics as great as any before, such as the quantum pioneers of the 1920s and 1930s ended up sparking a scientific revolution and technological, so this generation of physicists is ready to usher in a new quantum era, an era in which Einstein's hated quantum entanglement now produces unbreakable computer security, new types of communication systems, super-fast computers. and other advances that we still can't even imagine and that is why quantum mechanics excites and frustrates me it is capricious it is counterintuitive it even sometimes feels just wrong and yet it surprises us every day and I, for one, believe that Our knowledge of the quantum world is still far from complete, there are still greater truths about nature to be discovered and that is still what is keeping me up at night this week.

Join me as my journey into the quantum world becomes even more intense. I investigate how its strange rules are crucial. for life and how the strange behavior of subatomic particles could even influence evolution itself. Welcome to a new and very strange world of nature dominated by the strange subatomic particles of quantum physics. As a physicist, I have spent my working life studying how these particles behave. in the laboratory but now I'm heading out into the natural world. I am on a mission to prove that quantum physics can solve biology's greatest mysteries. This is a real adventure for me.

I'm way out of my comfort zone trying this. apply thevery careful ideas that I am familiar with in a Physics laboratory to the disordered world of living beings. I believe that quantum physics could hold many of the

secrets

of life that deep in the cells of animals, particles slip through the walls like ghosts that when captured by plants. sunlight your cells are invaded by bright waves that can be everywhere at the same time and that even our human senses are tuning into strange quantum vibrations in the fantastic world of quantum biology life is a game of chance played by rules This is what I hope to convince you to show you that quantum mechanics is essential to explaining many of the important processes of life and potentially that quantum mechanics can even support the very existence of life itself.

The Foreigner begins with one of the most majestic views of the wild migration each winter Barnacle Geese arrive at just the right time on the Scottish River itself, the end of an epic 2,000-mile journey from Svalbard, far above the Polar Circle Arctic, of course, many birds head south for the winter and then return home for the summer, but for decades exactly how birds navigated with such a CK. one of the greatest mysteries of biology, which is why the most recent discovery has caused a sensation. Yes, in recent years, one species of bird has helped create a scientific revolution.

I was one of many physicists who were surprised to discover that he navigates using one of the strangest tricks in all of science. It uses a quirk of quantum mechanics that fooled even the greatest physicists, from Richard Feynman to Albert Einstein himself, so you may be surprised to discover the identity of this mysterious creature. Say hello to Quantum Robin. This is the European Robin, each year it migrates from northern Europe to the tip of Spain and back in this laboratory in the forest, biologist Henrik Morrison is trying to solve the mystery of how it does it but it finds itself in my world The strange world From quantum mechanics mechanics describes the very strange behavior of subatomic particles in this realm of the very small, we have to abandon common sense and intuition.

Instead, this is a world where objects can spread out like waves. Quantum particles can be in many places at once and send each other. Mysterious communications I set out to understand how the bird finds its way, but it turned out that the data increasingly pointed toward this as the only explanation that could bring together all the different results. I'm investigating a long-standing theory of how robins navigate. Earth's magnetic field Your lab is an ingenious magnetic bird cage, and these plastic cones lined with scratch-sensitive paper provide the key measurements. Hendrick's artificial magnetic field is like the Earth, except you can point it in any direction you want within its cones.

Robins always respond to the field by leaving scratches in only one direction. The big mystery is how the Earth's magnetic field is incredibly weak, too weak for any living creature to detect, but Henrik has found an intriguing clue by giving the quantum Robin a mask. , we have some leather. Hood similar to what you put on a falcon, you know, but only for Robin and then you have a hole in front of one eye or a hole in front of the other eye, but what we can see is that if you cover the right eye, they turn off their magnetic compass processing in the left brain.

If you cover this eye, you turn off the compass in this part of the brain. Robin's magnetic compass seemed to be in his eyes. I can show you what's going on using mine. Be careful, now we use our eyes to see, but we also have a second light detection mechanism. If I shine this torch in my eye, you can see my pupil closes, it's basically a defense mechanism to protect my eyes. My eye is responding to light particles. or photons, the energy provided by photons is clearly enough to activate chemical reactions, after all, that is what controls my eye muscles.

The light must be causing similar chemical reactions in Robin's eyes. In fact, it is the power source for a unique form of magnetic compass within his cells. In the strange world of subatomic particles, a place where only quantum physics can explain what's happening, see why imagine the chemical reactions in Robin's eye taking place in mountains and valleys of energy to get a reaction to start. .push molecules to the top of a mountain thanks to henrik's experiments we now know that light does most of the hard work when it reaches the free peak the molecule becomes incredibly sensitive to the slightest touch the key point here is that the compass Robin's chemistry is now balanced at an energy peak between two valleys going in one direction produces one set of chemicals the other a different set now even a small change in the earth's magnetic field can cause the molecule to reach the top , but the way this happens defies common sense, the final piece solving the puzzle depends on one of the truly mind-blowing ideas in physics, but don't worry if you find it difficult to understand.

Even Albert Einstein called it creepy. The idea is called quantum entanglement. It involves particles that appear to communicate faster than velocity. of light in 1935 Einstein published a famous paper arguing that it was impossible, but Einstein was wrong In recent years extremely delicate experiments have shown that subatomic particles are actually entangled, meaning that they can subtly and instantaneously influence each other through the space now it looks like the same thing is happening inside Robin's eye when a photon enters Robin's eye it creates what is called an entangled pair of electrons this is how it works each electron has two possible states for simplicity I choose to call them red and green now this It's the strange thing until I measure it, it's neither one nor the other, but they both at the same time think that the electrons spin simultaneously in red and green, but by shooting a dart I can force the first electron to do one or the other until now it's just a game. of probability I don't know what I'll get until I try it, so I know my first electron is red.

Suppose I now measure the second electron. You'd think you'd have a 50% chance of coming up red or green after all. that's what you'd expect in the normal everyday world, but you'd be wrong in quantum entanglement. Electrons are mysteriously linked. For example, if I turn red in the first, I always turn red in the second. It is no longer a game of chance. as if the first electron was telling the second what to do, that's why Einstein called it creepy. Electrons seem to know that they should both have the same color no matter how far away they are.

The really important part is that the two electrons don't need to. Even though they are the same color, they can entangle in different ways, so that if the first electron is red, the second is always green. It seems that this mysterious connection is the ultimate secret of Robin's quantum compass, because the direction of the Earth's magnetic field can vary. influence the outcome near the equator they are more likely to be red red but near the pole they are more likely to be red green and that is the vital factor that ultimately tips the balance of Robin's chemical compass variations in the change of the field Earth's magnetic field the way the electrons in Robin's eye intertwine and that is enough to activate his compass now we can finally see how something is weak as the Earth's magnetic field can tip that balance one way or another no no no no no no no no no no If the message changes the tips of the chemical reaction in a different way by changing Robin's compass reading it suddenly seems like a fundamentally quantum mechanical phenomenon in Birds would be one of the first, If not the first, in biology, biologists better get used to the weirdness of physics.

Robin is navigating through spooky quantum entanglements to see subtle quantum effects, even in the austere and controlled environment of a physics lab, it's really difficult and yet here's the robin doing it with ease, these experiments are real and verifiable and yet, even though I am seeing them with My own eyes I still find it hard to believe, thank you, bird navigation has united physics and nature as the science of quantum biology. There's a whole new world to explore, but its pioneers have discovered that it doesn't just affect. Birds affect everyone. of us because the latest experiments say that you are doing quantum physics right now and believe it or not, you are doing it with a strange nose, our sense of smell is remarkable and quite different from our other senses of sight and hearing among the thousands of Smells that we can recognize, many of them can trigger very powerful memories and emotions.

It is as if our sense of smell is connected directly to our inner consciousness. It is also different in another way. The other senses of sight and hearing depend on us detecting light and sound waves but our sense of smell involves detecting particles, chemical molecules. Recently, scientists have begun to realize that when it comes to our sense of smell, something is happening. Very mysterious For decades biologists thought they knew exactly how our noses sniffed out different chemicals, but physicists like Jenny Brooks think there could be a new ingredient in the mix and it smells like quantum mechanics.

A lot of people think that the sense of smell and the function and the science of affect is a problem that has been solved and we know everything and We know a lot about it We know about the ingredients We know about the equipment that we use to smell but I would say that there is a little more to understand to understand more I need someone to help me with a sniff test and Jim goes sniffing it emits a cocktail of chemicals. Jen's nose can detect a single gram dissolved in an entire city, so she has no problem finding the man I'm looking for.

She meets Colin The Gardener, a man who is used to smelling flowers well. So Colin, I'm going to test your sniffing skills. I have a selection of chemicals here and I want you to tell me what they remind you of. Well, I'll start yours off easily as a peppermint vapor rub. It's yes, menthol, yes, but it's that essence, here's the next one, ah, you should be able to recognize this one talking to my daughter, um, icing sugar, vanilla, vanilla, yes, when our noses detect a chemical, they trigger a signal nervous to our brain, strange, but Different chemicals create different sensations.

The standard explanation for this has to do with the shape of the molecules. A conventional theory dating back to the 1950s says that the odor molecule has a particular shape that allows it to fit into the receptor molecules in our nose. If it is the right shape, it is like a hand in a glove or a key in a lock. in fact it is called lock and key mechanism with the wrong shape it does not fit in the receptor but with the correct shape it fits in the receptor activating that unique smell sensation, different receptors are connected to different parts of our brain, so when a menthol molecule locks on its specific receptor, triggering that cool, minty feeling, but the lock and key theory has always had a problem and Colin's next test will show you why.

How about this quite strong smell? Oh, that's right, yeah, what does that remind you of? What does it evoke in you? What memories? I think Christmas cake, yes, yes, that's it, yes, very, yes. Colin identified the smell of marzipan or almonds, in fact, it is due to an aromatic molecule. called benzaldehyde what I didn't give it to smell was this other chemical cyanide both benzaldehyde and cyanide have the same smell they both smell like almonds but these molecules have very different shapes so the lock and key mechanism is an explanation of how We smell It can't be the whole story, so why would two molecules with different shapes smell the same?

Quantum biology has a surprising explanation. He says our noses don't smell chemical molecules, they listen to them. It's not just the shape of a scent. Molecule That Matters, let's take a closer look at this cyanide molecule model. The white ball here is a hydrogen atom and the gray bars are the bonds that hold it together with carbon and nitrogen, but the reality is not that simple. It can give you a better idea of ​​what's going on if we look at this bigger white ball and you'll see that the atoms don't stay still, the bonds that hold them together are like vibrating strings and that gives us a whole new way of thinking about smell. .

The strange new quantum theory of smell is all about vibrating bonds. Chemical molecules are playing music to our noses. Let's imagine that a moleculereceiver in my nose is like my guitar before it can make a sound. An odor molecule has to enter my nose. And when that odor molecule enters. instead its chemical bonds provide the strings and it is ready to be played the receptor molecules contain quantum particles electrons as they jump from one atom to another they vibrate the bonds of the odor molecule like my fingers plucking a guitar string notable about this theory is that it tells us that our sense of smell has to do with the vibrations of molecules or wave behavior and not so much with the shape of a particular odor molecule, our sense of smell may be much more like our It makes sense to hear a particular molecule say that the herb will vibrate at a particular frequency, but a different molecule, say that of mint, will vibrate at a different frequency.

This would explain why cyanide smells like almonds. The two molecules have different shapes, but their chemical bonds simply vibrate at the same frequency. The constant vibration. in Adrian it is almost literally like a sound particle, so yes, we are saying that the process of smell could be exactly like an acoustic resonance event. It might be very analogous to hearing and seeing, actually, but can we really hear with our noses? a strange theory needs a strange experiment to prove it this is how it works scientists used a molecule that smells fruity like orange blossom, but if the theory is correct then it should be able to change its smell by changing its vibrations the molecule contains many hydrogen atoms like this bonded to carbon atoms, what would happen if you replaced all of these atoms with a different form of hydrogen called deuterium?

Now it won't change the shape of the molecule, but it will change the way it vibrates. Here's why deuterium is twice as heavy. like normal hydrogen and that's why it vibrates more slowly now different vibrations mean different smells so if you were to make a new form of this chemical filled with deuterium atoms instead of normal hydrogen it should smell different Quantum biologists found a unique way to carry out this I experienced a smell comparison using the real experts in fruity aromas first fruit flies the flies were trained to avoid the modified version of the fruity molecule to be honest I have no idea how a fruit fly is trained fruit, but apparently you can In the laboratory, the flies had to go through a kind of foreign maze.

They were then given the option to go right to get the pleasant fruit smell or left to get the unpleasant modified version. There they could definitely smell the difference. They always preferred the original, right-turned foreign fly experiment. provides compelling evidence that quantum smell theory really works. But ultimately it works in harmony with the lock and key. Theory: First, the odor molecule fits into the receptor and then those molecular vibrations take over. Incredible, as it appears that flies, humans and dogs may be sniffing out quantum sound. biology, our sense of smell is fascinating and mysterious, but to think that when I encounter a particular smell and that triggers a whole wave of memories and emotions in my mind that is based on the fact that it is triggered by quantum mechanics, I think it still does More Most notably, the mysterious influence of quantum physics reaches into every corner of the natural world—in fact, it inhabits the walls of every living cell on Earth—because the latest experiments suggest a magical solution to one of the biggest mysteries. of nature: the miracle of metamorphosis, transformation.

The transformation of a tadpole into a frog has never been fully explained. In just over six weeks, the tadpole breaks down and then reassembles into its adult form, but the big mystery is how it happens so quickly. When you think about it, there is nothing more extraordinary than a tadpole turning. In a frog, take its tail for example, over a period or several weeks, it is reabsorbed into the body and the proteins and fibers that make up the flesh are recycled to form the frog's new limbs, but for this to happen, it is They require billions and billions of chemical reactions. together breaking molecules forming new ones in a carefully orchestrated dance, but the fibers that hold the flesh together are very, very strong, they are a bit like these ropes that hold my raft together in order to dismantle the raft, I would have to undo these very tight knots .

You can think of it as this pole being held together by long ropes of proteins knotted together by chemical bonds. The bonds are so strong that they should last for years, much longer than the entire lifespan of the tadpole. So how can you turn into a frog in just a minute? In a few weeks, the explanation involves one of the most important molecules in life, little gadgets in all of our cells called enzymes, because enzymes are the actual machinery of the cell, they are actually the little machines inside the cells that perform The chemical transformations that are involved in everyday life are absolutely crucial and the reason they are so crucial is because what they can do is speed up chemical reactions by enormous amounts.

Let me show you how quickly the enzymes go to work inside this bottle: a substance called You're probably most familiar with hydrogen peroxide as the chemical used to bleach hair. I actually got this sample from my local hairdressers. Hydrogen peroxide is also produced in the body and it is the liver's job to get rid of it now. What it does is use an enzyme that breaks down hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen. Now to show you how fast this enzyme works. I'm going to do a quick demonstration. Here I have some liver that I have cut in order. to release the enzyme now watch what happens when I add this liver mixture containing the enzyme to the hydrogen peroxide watch how fast the oxygen is released just one hundred grams of liver shot my rocket almost 20 feet.

Liver enzymes make the breakdown of hydrogen peroxide incredibly efficient. It happens a billion times faster, that is, a million million times faster than it would otherwise be. In Metamorphosis, it is the enzymes that dismantle the tadpole's tail and that means breaking it down. an incredibly resistant protein called collagen, collagen is one of the most important proteins for the biological world, it is the protein that really gives that resistance, that elasticity to the tendons, to the cartilage and, of course, to our skin as well and in the tail of the tadpole it provides. the type of scaffold that supports that structure now, when the tadpole transforms into a frog, what you have to do is essentially have a collagenase enzyme that will literally cut the collagen into small pieces and therefore take that scaffold apart, but how do you it does?

Enzymes break chemical bonds so incredibly fast. Let me show you why it is a problem that only quantum biology can solve. Think about it this way. All these different parts of the knot are like subatomic particles, electrons, protons that hold the different parts of the molecule together. To untie the knot, enzymes have to move protons, but as you can see, this takes quite a bit of effort and a lot of time, if there are many, many knots to untie, physicists have a fancy way of saying trying hard to do something, they say. you have to overcome an energy barrier, ok here is my energy barrier and here is my proton to break, on the part that needs enough energy to overcome the barrier, the problem is that when we calculate how long it would take, it is too slow to break. the tail of a tadpole, but this is where protons become ghosts.

I don't blame you for thinking that this is an idea that some clever theorist came up with and that it's just mere speculation, something we have no evidence for, but we do. Occurs. All the time in the quantum world the protons don't have to go through barriers, they can go straight through the tunnels and get to the very heart of what is most strange in quantum mechanics, it is unlike anything we see in our everyday world. Quantum particles can tunnel from one. from one place to another even if it has to cross an impenetrable barrier they are not solid objects like balls in our everyday world they have a diffuse wave behavior that allows them to filter through an energy barrier a particle can disappear on one side of the barrier and instantly reappears in the other in nuclear physics, this effect is a proven fact without quantum tunneling, the sun simply would not shine, but I never thought I would see it in a tadpole, it is difficult to emphasize how strange this process is.

It's as if I walked up to a solid brick wall and, like a ghost, disappeared on one side and reappeared on the other. The most important advantage of tunneling is its much faster speed than if protons passed through the barrier, as a nuclear physicist does. Quantum tunneling is my bread. and buttery subatomic particles like protons do it all the time, but what does this have to do with biology? The answer is that without quantum ghosts the metamorphosis of a tadpole would be impossible. Remember that chemical bonds are basically knots that you tunnel into and untie quickly.

Take a look at these. Now two knots at first glance look identical, but there is a subtle difference: this knot has the two short ends of the rope on the same side, while this one has the two short ends on opposite sides. Now you think that wouldn't make a difference, but you see that this knot is very difficult to break while this one is easy. Quantum tunneling turns strong knots into weak ones, so in a tadpole the entire collagen structure breaks easily and is eventually reconstructed into a frog shape by other enzymes. Quantum tunneling of particles is one of those strange features of the subatomic world that a physicist like me is very familiar with.

After all, it is responsible for radioactive decay and it continues inside the sun, it is the reason why the Sun and all The stars shine, but to be discovered. that is happening inside every cell of every living organism on the planet because every cell contains enzymes now I find something strange really amazing. Quantum biology casts its spell on every living creature we have ever seen. Birds, mammals, insects and amphibians are

govern

ed by the strangest

laws

of science, but the most spectacular recent advance concerns the only life process of which All these forms of life depend on: the conversion of air and sunlight into plants.

At the moment it passes just this side of the planet Venus, it is a bullet with the name of this tree. The bullet is a photon approaching the end of its long journey from the Sun. Its final destination is to initiate a series of chemical reactions that sustain the entire life on Earth's photosynthesis every second of every day sixteen thousand tons of new plant life are created on Earth and it is incredible to me to think that our existence on this planet depends on what happens in the next billionth of a second. The crucial first stage of photosynthesis is the capture of energy from the Sun is almost one hundred percent efficient and is superior to any human technology, but how every plant on Earth achieves this is one of the great enigmas of biology. when it turned out that quantum weirdness might hold the answer that physicists could.

I don't think so, it was like a revelation, it was very exciting because I was used to working on problems that were quite abstract experiments. I am a theorist, but I always related my theory to experiments that were very clean in the laboratory, things that can be done. control but now I discover that the things I knew can help me better understand how nature really works. I don't know scientifically. It was like an inspiration for my life as a scientist, so I really, as I would say, fell in love. With this field, the biology textbook says that the color of green plants comes from the chlorophyll molecules inside living cells, they absorb sunlight, this energy is then transferred incredibly fast to the food factory in the heart of the cell, the entire event takes only one millionth of it.

In a millionth of a second, when the photon hits the cell, it knocks out an electron from the center of a chlorophyll molecule, creating a small packet of energy called output in the exton, and then bounces through a forest of chlorophyll molecules to reach the cell. What is now called the reaction center is where your energy is used to drive the chemical processes that create life's most important biomolecules. The problem is that the exton needs to find its way to the reaction center first or biology can't explain how. the output does this because of course it doesn't know where it's going, it just bounces around like a pinball in a process called a random walk, sooner or later it will happenfor each part of the cell, but this is not the most efficient way to move because when the output finally reaches the reaction center it is by pure charm, if the exoton just jumps blindly and randomly between the chlorophyll molecules, it would take too long reach the reaction center and it would have lost its energy.

Wasted heat but not happening Something very different must be happening The vital clue comes from recent experiments that surprised the world of science Chemists shot lasers at plant cells to simulate capturing sunlight and confirmed that the exoton was not bouncing A along a disordered path through the cell, this original understanding did not explain what we were observing in the lab, so the mystery was realized. So what is the explanation for what we are observing in the laboratory? The solution is that plants obey the most famous law. In all of quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle says that you can never be sure that the output is in a specific location, but instead behaves like a quantum wave that spreads throughout the cell.

The output does not simply move from A to B in a strange but very real sense of heading in all directions at the same time spreading out like a wave so that all possible roots can be explored simultaneously. This hits at the very heart of what is so strange about quantum mechanics: the exotonic wave is not simply going this way or that way, it follows all paths at the same time, that is what gives it such incredible efficiency. If the way out is to try all routes to the Reaction Center at once, forced to find the fastest possible way to deliver your energy, it's difficult.

To express how incredible this discovery seems to physicists like me, biological cells are filled with the random movement of billions of atoms and molecules that somehow hold their shape as beautiful, perfect quantum waves that carry the energy that guarantees life on Earth. A whole new world opened up. scientific path for me and for me, I really enjoy the fact that in order to fully understand what is happening there or in plants, you have to interact with scientists who have completely different approaches, such as biologists and chemists, but we all have to come together to really understand.

What is the relevance of this? So for me this is one of the most interesting parts of this field. Real scientific experiments leave no room for doubt. The strange hand of quantum mechanics has shaped the entire living world. It's no surprise that you find Quantum. The tricks that are used in biological systems are because they are better. Quantum entanglement is normally seen in the tightly controlled conditions of the physics laboratory, but we now know that the Robins use it to navigate with extraordinary precision. Quantum vibrations mean our noses hear enhancing chemicals. Our perception of the world around us on which the living cells of all animals depend disappears and reappears like ghosts striking the vital processes of life Synthesis reveals the big picture A bright world where quantum waves capture the energy of the sun in wait a minute sometimes people say ah but physicists have been looking for this for decades.

Well, biology has been around for millions of years. The ultra-modern science of quantum mechanics is an ancient fact of life. By the end of my journey, I want to take these ideas to their logical conclusion, of course, as a scientist. The speculations I have have to be supported by careful experiments, so I want to invent a thought experiment that will help me answer the most important biological question I can think of: does quantum physics play any role in the mechanism of evolution itself? In 1859, Charles Darwin surprised the world. world with his theory of evolution by natural selection, went on to explain the differences between humans and other apes 150 years later, there is no doubt that Darwin's theory explains all living organisms on land and sea, but I would like explore the latest extraordinary performance.

Based on his ideas, could there be a quantum theory of evolution? The snails I'm used to seeing in my back garden tend to have pretty boring shells so take a look at this beauty, the patterns on her shell match perfectly with the lines on the stem it's called a sepia numeralis banded snail and the pattern doesn't it is there by accident come and take a look at this less adapted snails are more likely to be found here this stone is called a thrush anvil the thrush is the main predator of the snail catches a snail and breaks its shell against the stone to get to the snail Now what I can see here is that there aren't many banded snail shells, suggesting that its colors camouflage it very well hiding it from the strange bird.

Darwin's theory says that Evolution depends on variation within a species. Snails with camouflage are more likely to survive and reproduce, passing their shells to the next generation so that the species as a whole is better adapted, so variation, the random differences between snails, is the driving force behind of its evolution now. All species evolve and adapt to their environment, but the question I would like to explore is whether quantum mechanics plays a role in this. The only way to find out is through scientific experiments. So my adventures in quantum biology finally take me home, to the University of Surrey, here at the Laboratories I am planning a new analysis of the most famous molecule in science, deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA stubble.

The helix contains the genetic code of every living organism. It is a notable fact that Darwin himself had no idea what created variation in species. The structure of DNA was not discovered until 1953 by Francis Crick and James Watson. The most famous feature of DNA is, of course, its beautiful double helix structure, but that's just scaffolding. The true genetic secret is found among the four molecules of different colors that are called bases, color code. on one side it says blue red blue forms a gene that parents pass on to their children a gene is a bit like a puzzle fits together so one complete strand of the double helix forms a color pattern but the other strand always matches them in the same way , a blue base always goes with yellow and green always goes with red because only those colors have the right shape to fit.

Crick and Watson realized that this provides a mechanism for passing on the genetic code when cells replicate the two strands of DNA separates and is ready to be copied, but red still matches green and yellow matches blue. , so little by little the cell creates two new strands, two perfect copies of the complete genetic code. So far there is no genetic variation. This new copy is identical to the original. but here is the interesting part during the copying process, something very important can happen, sometimes errors appear, they are called mutations, let's take a look at these two bases here, the two tips that hold them together are subatomic particles, they are protons, They are basically the bonds between the strands of DNA these protons can jump to the other side if the strands split when the protons have jumped they are in the wrong position Now this red base will no longer bond to a green base it has to bond to a yellow base, replacing it.

We see that now this copy is no longer identical to the original because I have a yellow base here instead of a green one. We have brought a genetic mutation. Skipping protons would change the snail's DNA. It could create a new gene for camouflaged shells. The question is how the protons jump. I think quantum fear may take over now for these mutations to occur. Protons have an energy barrier to overcome and if you remember well what happened with the enzymes, you can probably guess what comes next. Protons can behave as if the barriers did not exist.

The tunnel runs straight through it, but does this ghostly effect really happen? My colleagues in biology are already searching. the first evidence of quantum mutations they didn't even know about quantum mechanics, so when you tell them you know that particles can be in two places at once, they can't say well, not in my cells, they can't, our experiments involve samples. of bacteria the first sample is prepared in normal water containing hydrogen nuclei or protons when bacteria reproduce we simply count the mutations, but if our theory is correct then we should be able to change the rate at which the mutations occur.

Remember how we tested quantum theory. of smell what happens if I replace the proton with its big brother the deuteron this is the nucleus of a deuterium atom now crucially A deuteron is twice as heavy as a proton and this should influence how easy it is for the deuteron to quantum tunnel Quantum mechanics is full of surprises. Protons tunnel easily into deuterons, right? These heavier particles are much more likely to bounce back, so the second bacteria sample is prepared in heavy water that is full of deuterons. Our theory says we should get a lot fewer mutations and so far.

The results are extremely encouraging. The preliminary experiments we have done give us a clue that the mutation rate is indeed depressed and in deuterated water we found that it is decreased, so my hunches were correct, but we will have to wait a little bit first. We are sure that the final test is in the future, even if we are right. Quantum tunneling is a rare form of mutation, but our results promise strong evidence for a new explanation of one of life's most fundamental processes, including the closest possibility of a new quantum mechanism for evolution itself is tremendously exciting. ;

In fact, the story of quantum biology is just beginning, what the frog, the robin, the fruit fly and the tree have shown us: that real quantum effects occur in nature all the time, and if there are We have learned something from the history of quantum mechanics. It is this. We can never be sure where new discoveries will take us. Quantum biology is a revolution in science, but it's time for it to return to the physics department. Thanks thanks. I know I deserve you. I know you are my savior but when I look at you you change your behavior and I am stuck.