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PeelingLayers 9 minutes ago [-]
Everything is waves it seems - fréquences and amplitudes are different, but cell oscillation, market, even the joys of music, and theme park rides - the things the brain needs and enjoys keep tickling it through wave action. Human behavior in groups and online as well. I’ve been doing experiments with https://www.wishlst.com and anything from color wavelengths to traffic patterns devolves to fourier-transform like math for multiple waves of people or light waves colliding.
__MatrixMan__ 9 hours ago [-]
I feel like "is biology quantum?" gates are kept in a needlessly stringent way.
They say that biological systems are too warm for quantum coherence to persist long enough to have meaningful effects. But if you have some molecule whose conformation is in a superposition of states--however briefly--and then the environment causes it to decohere and take on some fully determined non-quantum shape... that actual shape is still one of many possible ones into which it did not decohere. The environment has still hacked probability to trigger decoherence into this shape and not some other one, and evolution leans on this.
If you took a classical bag and filled it with classical locks and classical keys and just shook it around for a while, none of those keys would end up in the locks. But because of this quantum lubricant, ligands binding receptors do find themselves in the appropriate conformation to facilitate signal transduction, even at low concentrations. It's absolutely astounding that it works at all, and in a fully classical world it wouldn't for the same reason that the keys don't end up in the locks when you shake the bag for a while.
Biology is plenty quantum, and the people who are here to tell you it isn't are citing the abundance of interactions as evidence that it is not quantum, but it's through those many interactions that its quantum nature expresses itself.
Maybe it's not spooky-action-at-a-distance style quantum. Maybe it's not indeterminate enough for this theoretical purpose or that one. If you're trying to cram god in there, well it might not be quite spooky enough for that, but so much of what happens in the macroscopic world would not happen if the quantum world were not as strange as it is, and that's doubly true for biology.
FeepingCreature 6 hours ago [-]
Aiui most people who push for "biology is quantum" specifically want the large-scope effects because they're grasping for it as a way to justify why consciousness is special. Cells are of course plenty quantum at the scale of molecular interactions.
aeonik 54 minutes ago [-]
I think you are right, but this is a straw man.
There are some quantum consciousness cults out there, but plenty of people are interested in investigating the quantum nature of biological effects including consciousness that aren't quacks.
There is also a tendency for some scientists to react dismissively to hypotheses associated with pseudoscience, even when the narrower scientific question is perfectly legitimate.
Reminds me of the visceral reactions in history, like the Rejection of Continental drift (i.e. high level idea was right, but mechanisms hadn't been pinned down yet).
Not claiming that the quantum hypothesis is right, just saying we didn't jump to conclusions.
Eridanus2 7 hours ago [-]
The keys could random walk to lock-ports in finite time iff the search space were 2D or 1D. In 3D space, it is gets very unlikely. Biology solves it by dimensionality reduction, find substrates, cling, slide and find love/compatible hole.
jryb 3 hours ago [-]
Your key and lock analogy is simply incorrect. Those interactions can be modeled with classic electrochemistry and are super predictive - the specificity is driven by evolution, not quantum mechanics. I mean sure, every system is technically quantum mechanical but those effects are never explored afaik.
There are even educational demonstrations where people shake bags of 3D printed proteins with magnets (including competing proteins) and you end up with the expected structure.
__MatrixMan__ 3 minutes ago [-]
classic electrochemistry has plenty of quantum effects baked into the parameters of the theory, it just doesn't bother to explain them in quantum terms.
I'll have to look up those demonstrations. I know if I were making such a thing I'd stack the deck in favor of a good demonstration and I'd stick to very simple interactions. But if they've given the potential for random useless tangles a fair shake I'll have to rethink my position.
If somebody has made some analog of ATP synthase which operates in this way it would be just fantastic to behind.
Although if I did relax this position, I'd then be in need an explanation for why all of biochemistry feels like it takes place in some kind of cartoon universe. Like, maybe I've failed to put my finger on the reason, but I can't shake the feeling that the world being presented in biology class is just a little too cute to be this one.
joebig 7 hours ago [-]
There is some inaccuracy here I think. Decoherence means washing out of interference phenomenon, viz. you will observe no fringes in the double slit experiment with incoherent source pair (they switch so rapidly as to end up plain grey). What is erased or overwritten in tiny timescales cannot have a residual resultant or guiding gulley effect, or as you say, freezing the pattern/steric landscape in a preffered state repeatably. It would be tantamount to observing the fringe pattern with incoherent sources, for all timescales.
arbitrandomuser 9 hours ago [-]
adjacent possibly related interesting fact , classically the temperature required to crosss the coulumb repulsion and fuse hydrogen in the sun is far higher than at the core of the sun,
what makes fusion viable at the core is there is a chance for nuclei tunneling through the barrier , that and the sheer size of the sun
__MatrixMan__ 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. Its as if the laws of physics are running an operating system that wants interesting stuff to happen, and needs only a fragment of a bell curve to seize the day and send us down the appropriate leg of the trousers of time.
amelius 7 hours ago [-]
Semiconductor physics is built on quantum mechanics. And transistors can get hot ...
dataviz1000 56 minutes ago [-]
Something similar came up in Neil deGrasse Tyson's StarTalk yesterday. [0]
Neil deGrasse Tyson used the number 8 as an analogy to explain that mathematical similarities between two systems do not mean they share a physical connection -- they were discussing how both the universe and human brain can be described using fractal mathematics. He pointed out that you can count 8 planets in the solar system and 8 children in a room, but having the same count doesn't mean the children are planets.
The similarities say more about mathematics than it does about the universe and the human brain or planets and children.
That it says something about the human brain seems to be about right. If you have 8 planets and 8 children it means you've classified certain things you've seen to be part of the same concept and you group them together.
smashers1114 7 hours ago [-]
I feel like the author was either trying to write to a pretty lay audience or didn't understand the broad applicability of quantum mechanics. There is no threshold either where things are "classical" or "quantum". The systems that may be satisfactorily described by classical mechanics are just those in which the Planck constant may have a value of zero. While in modeling a system using quantum mechanics, it has a finite value.
Computational chemistry is based on different approximation methods for evaluating the interactions of a molecule with another. These methods work well, and as you can imagine form a large portion of biochemistry. Saying "Biology may not be quantum.." in the title seems pretty misleading at best.
Most of the interview quotes are researchers talking about any sort of long term coherence used in a biological organism. The article mentions this in brief but I didn't see a link. For a real cool example of biology pushing quantum limits check out the magnetic field "vision" of birds [0].
Edit: FTA, "In photosynthesis, for example, organisms use specialized pigments and proteins to harvest light with nearly perfect quantum efficiency; they convert almost every incoming photon into useful chemical energy."
Edit: this is about standing waves and overtones: "In 2024, Scholes found a way to design complex networks of oscillators such that they produced emergent states — stable patterns of synchronized behavior, like a crowd that claps in time — that could be mathematically described as vectors in a Hilbert space."
hankbond 11 hours ago [-]
This is some of the coolest photography I have ever seen. Using multiple shots as a "discrete long exposure": I have never thought to do in this way.
HarHarVeryFunny 39 minutes ago [-]
I didn't even realize what I was looking at to begin with - I thought it was modern sculpture looking very interesting and organic, although the "installation" locations seemed almost impossible! :)
I agree. The photographer even has a TED talk about it.
throwfaraway135 6 hours ago [-]
At some point we will need to get rid of the artificial boundaries of physics, chemistry and biology.
It made sense before when we could only look at things in their locality, but as we improve and see things at better and better resolution having a division will become meaningless.
rcxdude 3 hours ago [-]
They are different areas (and to some extent levels of abstraction). I think the distinction would remain relevant even if we had a perfect theory of everything and an exact mapping between every layer and concept.
airstrike 12 hours ago [-]
I feel like a higher n-dimensional being observing time in a completely different way through those images, as if I could touch the bird at any of those points if I wanted.
Such a simple concept but really remarkable work.
RagnarD 8 hours ago [-]
So wearying to keep seeing people talk about biology, including the human brain, as though it were guided by Newtonian physics. No. All of the matter and energy in the universe is understood via quantum mechanics. Chemistry would make zero sense without it. "Biology might not be quantum" is therefore just ignorant at best.
armchairhacker 6 hours ago [-]
Really the question is, when will we discover a biological phenomena that can’t be explained by Newtonian physics, including the earlier “wrong” chemistry models?
griffzhowl 2 hours ago [-]
Photosynthesis was found to rely on a coherent superposition a few years ago
mrbluecoat 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 2 days ago [-]
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
That's fair. Quantum is an extremely fragile state - any perturbance will collapse the field state into an observed classical physics value. This is why complex machinery and near absolute zero temperatures are required to maintain it. I guess 'quantumlike' just felt like an affront to the science of it all.
Melatonic 2 days ago [-]
"Almost Entangled" - the new Quantumlike Rom Com coming to a movie theater near you !
dtagames 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
OutOfHere 12 hours ago [-]
I feel there is enough happening in the brain that we need to understand it further beyond classical physics can allow. I suspect especially that a mother and child share a strong lifelong subspace bond, whereby they can sense one another's state, in a way that logic or physics cannot explain. This sensing bond probably exists with others too but at an exponentially weaker level. I am not asserting anything, only begging inquiry.
bvcp 12 hours ago [-]
you could scientifically test this easily put n mothers and children in adjacent rooms and smack half the kids and measure the mothers opinion of the childs state. id wager no statistically difference
OutOfHere 9 hours ago [-]
There are two caveats:
1. The mothers cannot be told in advance anything about what will happen to their children, otherwise they will trigger false positives.
2. The objective is not merely to study the population-level rate, but also to engage in CIA-style experimentation whereby the experimenters try to find the few individuals that reproducibly have a substantially higher rate than of the population.
They say that biological systems are too warm for quantum coherence to persist long enough to have meaningful effects. But if you have some molecule whose conformation is in a superposition of states--however briefly--and then the environment causes it to decohere and take on some fully determined non-quantum shape... that actual shape is still one of many possible ones into which it did not decohere. The environment has still hacked probability to trigger decoherence into this shape and not some other one, and evolution leans on this.
If you took a classical bag and filled it with classical locks and classical keys and just shook it around for a while, none of those keys would end up in the locks. But because of this quantum lubricant, ligands binding receptors do find themselves in the appropriate conformation to facilitate signal transduction, even at low concentrations. It's absolutely astounding that it works at all, and in a fully classical world it wouldn't for the same reason that the keys don't end up in the locks when you shake the bag for a while.
Biology is plenty quantum, and the people who are here to tell you it isn't are citing the abundance of interactions as evidence that it is not quantum, but it's through those many interactions that its quantum nature expresses itself.
Maybe it's not spooky-action-at-a-distance style quantum. Maybe it's not indeterminate enough for this theoretical purpose or that one. If you're trying to cram god in there, well it might not be quite spooky enough for that, but so much of what happens in the macroscopic world would not happen if the quantum world were not as strange as it is, and that's doubly true for biology.
There are some quantum consciousness cults out there, but plenty of people are interested in investigating the quantum nature of biological effects including consciousness that aren't quacks.
There is also a tendency for some scientists to react dismissively to hypotheses associated with pseudoscience, even when the narrower scientific question is perfectly legitimate.
Reminds me of the visceral reactions in history, like the Rejection of Continental drift (i.e. high level idea was right, but mechanisms hadn't been pinned down yet).
Not claiming that the quantum hypothesis is right, just saying we didn't jump to conclusions.
There are even educational demonstrations where people shake bags of 3D printed proteins with magnets (including competing proteins) and you end up with the expected structure.
I'll have to look up those demonstrations. I know if I were making such a thing I'd stack the deck in favor of a good demonstration and I'd stick to very simple interactions. But if they've given the potential for random useless tangles a fair shake I'll have to rethink my position.
If somebody has made some analog of ATP synthase which operates in this way it would be just fantastic to behind.
Although if I did relax this position, I'd then be in need an explanation for why all of biochemistry feels like it takes place in some kind of cartoon universe. Like, maybe I've failed to put my finger on the reason, but I can't shake the feeling that the world being presented in biology class is just a little too cute to be this one.
what makes fusion viable at the core is there is a chance for nuclei tunneling through the barrier , that and the sheer size of the sun
Neil deGrasse Tyson used the number 8 as an analogy to explain that mathematical similarities between two systems do not mean they share a physical connection -- they were discussing how both the universe and human brain can be described using fractal mathematics. He pointed out that you can count 8 planets in the solar system and 8 children in a room, but having the same count doesn't mean the children are planets.
The similarities say more about mathematics than it does about the universe and the human brain or planets and children.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zNnJ2AzmA4
Computational chemistry is based on different approximation methods for evaluating the interactions of a molecule with another. These methods work well, and as you can imagine form a large portion of biochemistry. Saying "Biology may not be quantum.." in the title seems pretty misleading at best.
Most of the interview quotes are researchers talking about any sort of long term coherence used in a biological organism. The article mentions this in brief but I didn't see a link. For a real cool example of biology pushing quantum limits check out the magnetic field "vision" of birds [0].
[0] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0711968106
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09971-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09417-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10282-4 https://andrewgyork.github.io/gfp_magnetofluorescence/
Current AI + Quantum Mechanics = AGI?
This is the exact question that was in my mind when I asked if math had the solutions for our problems in Ask HN.
Now I see that math is quantum like for Biology to understand that for AGI we need to solve quantum first.
https://www.kavlifoundation.org/news/unraveling-the-quantum-...
Edit: FTA, "In photosynthesis, for example, organisms use specialized pigments and proteins to harvest light with nearly perfect quantum efficiency; they convert almost every incoming photon into useful chemical energy."
Edit: this is about standing waves and overtones: "In 2024, Scholes found a way to design complex networks of oscillators such that they produced emergent states — stable patterns of synchronized behavior, like a crowd that claps in time — that could be mathematically described as vectors in a Hilbert space."
I agree. The photographer even has a TED talk about it.
Such a simple concept but really remarkable work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
1. The mothers cannot be told in advance anything about what will happen to their children, otherwise they will trigger false positives.
2. The objective is not merely to study the population-level rate, but also to engage in CIA-style experimentation whereby the experimenters try to find the few individuals that reproducibly have a substantially higher rate than of the population.