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"Schrödinger's Bacterium" Could Be a Quantum Biology Milestone

posted by mrpg on Tuesday October 30 2018, @05:20AM   
from the milestone-is-too-long dept.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

"Schrödinger's Bacterium" Could Be a Quantum Biology Milestone

The quantum world is a weird one. In theory and to some extent in practice its tenets demand that a particle can appear to be in two places at once—a paradoxical phenomenon known as superposition—and that two particles can become "entangled," sharing information across arbitrarily large distances through some still-unknown mechanism.

[...] Coles and company sequestered several hundred photosynthetic green sulfur bacteria between two mirrors, progressively shrinking the gap between the mirrors down to a few hundred nanometers—less than the width of a human hair. By bouncing white light between the mirrors, the researchers hoped to cause the photosynthetic molecules within the bacteria to couple—or interact—with the cavity, essentially meaning the bacteria would continuously absorb, emit and reabsorb the bouncing photons. The experiment was successful; up to six bacteria did appear to couple in this manner.

[...] There are many caveats to such controversial claims, however. First and foremost, the evidence for entanglement in this experiment is circumstantial, dependent on how one chooses to interpret the light trickling through and out of the cavity-confined bacteria. Marletto and her colleagues acknowledge a classical model free of quantum effects could also account for the experiment's results. But, of course, photons are not classical at all—they are quantum.

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Original Submission

• Re:Make it a million, it won't hurt the poor Re:Make it a million, it won't hurt the poor (Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 30 2018, @10:05AM (1 child)

  by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Tuesday October 30 2018, @10:05AM (#755555) Homepage

  I agree, the article doesn't present the science well at all. What is most obviously missing is how the evidence makes any other interpretation unlikely - if there were not quantum entanglement going on, how would the results of the experiment be different. That is, after all, what makes scientific evidence scientific evidence, not just supporting one stance, but discounting an alternative one.

  --
  Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
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• Re:Make it a million, it won't hurt the poor (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 30 2018, @11:00AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 30 2018, @11:00AM (#755565)

  What is most obviously missing is how the evidence makes any other interpretation unlikely

  From the article:

  And yet a more realistic “semiclassical” model using Newton’s laws for the bacteria and quantum ones for photons fails to reproduce the actual outcome Coles and his colleagues observed in their laboratory.

  So we have:

  • Treating both photons and bacteria as classical does work
  • Treating photons as quantum and bacteria as classical does not work.
  • Treating both bacteria and photons as quantum does work.

  Now the argument is that photons are well-known to behave quantum in other experiments, which means the third option is more plausible than the first. Which is certainly a scientific argument. If it is a good argument is a different question (which to answer would require looking at the exact argument in the actual scientific article).

  Parent