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Schwenk Theodor (1962) Sensitive Chaos. Rudolf Steiner Press, London
Gutzwiller, M.C. (1992). Quantum chaos. Sci. Am. 266, 78 - 84
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Mark Anderson, Discover Magazine, January 13, 2009
Science's weirdest realm may be responsible for photosynthesis, our sense of smell, and even consciousness itself.
Graham Fleming and his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley and at Washington University in St. Louis
...photosynthesis [more energy-conversion efficient than anything created by man] appears to derive its ferocious efficiency not from the familiar physical laws that govern the visible world but from the seemingly exotic rules of quantum mechanics, the physics of the subatomic world. Somehow, in every green plant or photosynthetic bacterium, the two disparate realms of physics not only meet but mesh harmoniously. Welcome to the strange new world of quantum biology.
Quantum mechanics holds that any given particle has a chance of being in a whole range of locations and, in a sense, occupies all those places at once. Until a scientist measures the system, a particle exists in its multitude of locations. But at the time of measurement, the particle has to “choose” just a single spot. At that point, quantum physicists say, probability narrows to a single outcome and the wave function “collapses,” sending ripples of certainty through space-time. Imposing certainty on one particle could alter the characteristics of any others it has been connected with, even if those particles are now light-years away.
...new experiments keep finding quantum processes at play in biological systems, says Christopher Altman, a researcher at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience in the Netherlands. With the advent of powerful new tools like femtosecond (10-15 second) lasers and nanoscale-precision positioning, life’s quantum dance is finally coming into view.
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Hydrogen Atom Orbitals
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Then came the revelation: Instead of haphazardly moving from one connective channel to the next, as might be seen in classical physics, energy traveled in several directions at the same time. The researchers theorized that only when the energy had reached the end of the series of connections could an efficient pathway retroactively be found. At that point, the quantum process collapsed, and the electrons’ energy followed that single, most effective path.
Electrons moving through a leaf or a green sulfur bacterial bloom are effectively performing a quantum “random walk”—a sort of primitive quantum computation—to seek out the optimum transmission route for the solar energy they carry. “We have shown that this quantum random-walk stuff really exists,” Fleming says.
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...just throwing this out there; how many people haven't repeatedly experienced the phenomenon of precognitive dreams? Could your brain really be running quantum smear simulations of every possible reality, and sometimes finding a real good match that pushes itself to dream-awareness enough to remember it upon waking? Because when you think of typical precog-dreams, they actually could have been predicted if given enough time to run lots of possible simulations...time...
POST SCRIPT
Uncovering quantum secret in photosynthesis
phys.org, 20 Jun 2013
Watch the process of photosynthesis closely enough – at the femto-scale
– and it appears there are little packets of energy simultaneously
"trying" all of the possible paths to get where they need to go, and
then settling on the most efficient.
In an article published in the journal Science, researchers from ICFO-
Institute of Photonic Sciences, in collaboration with biochemists from the University of Glasgow
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