What We Can Learn From the Quantum Calculations of Birds and Bacteria - Wired Science

What We Can Learn From the Quantum Calculations of Birds and Bacteria - Wired Science: We can now show that a single electronic excitation acting as a probability amplitude wave can simultaneously sample the various molecular paths connecting the antenna cells to the reaction center. The excitation effectively “picks” the most efficient route from leaf surface to sugar conversion site from a quantum menu of possible paths. This requires that all possible states of the traveling particle be superposed in a single, coherent quantum state for tens of femtoseconds.

We have seen this remarkable phenomenon in the green sulphur bacteria, but humans have not yet figured out how it is that nature can stabilize a coherent electronic quantum state in such complex systems for such long periods of time...

Remarkably, it seems that these photosynthesizing bacteria can actually use decoherence to speed up the transfer of electronic information by accessing vibrational energies in the protein bath surrounding the biological-quantum wire without losing the integrity of the information...

It seems that quantum mechanical processes in the avian eye send signals to the brain that are sensitively dependent on the angle of change in magnetic field inclination, thereby allowing the bird to map routes. The hypothesis is that pairs of light-absorbing molecules in the bird retina produce quantum mechanically entangled electrons whose quantum mechanical state depends on the angular inclination of the field and which catalyze chemical reactions that send differently valued signals to the brain depending upon the degree of inclination.