Monday, April 16, 2007

That spider plant is smarter than me

The Miracle of Science

Just read a fascinating article outlining the way that chlorophyll makes use of quantum processes in photosynthesis.  It was known that photosynthesis converts the energy of the sun into sugar, and did it with remarkable efficiency.  What wasn’t known was exactly how this happened.  But some big brains have delved into the matter, and this is what they’ve come up with:

Through photosynthesis, green plants and cyanobacteria are able to transfer sunlight energy to molecular reaction centers for conversion into chemical energy with nearly 100-percent efficiency. Speed is the key - the transfer of the solar energy takes place almost instantaneously so little energy is wasted as heat. How photosynthesis achieves this near instantaneous energy transfer is a long-standing mystery that may have finally been solved...

“We have obtained the first direct evidence that remarkably long-lived wavelike electronic quantum coherence plays an important part in energy transfer processes during photosynthesis,” said Graham Fleming, the principal investigator for the study. “This wavelike characteristic can explain the extreme efficiency of the energy transfer because it enables the system to simultaneously sample all the potential energy pathways and choose the most efficient one.”

...Electronic spectroscopy measurements made on a femtosecond (millionths of a billionth of a second) time-scale showed these oscillations meeting and interfering constructively, forming wavelike motions of energy (superposition states) that can explore all potential energy pathways simultaneously and reversibly, meaning they can retreat from wrong pathways with no penalty. This finding contradicts the classical description of the photosynthetic energy transfer process as one in which excitation energy hops from light-capturing pigment molecules to reaction center molecules step-by-step down the molecular energy ladder.

“The classical hopping description of the energy transfer process is both inadequate and inaccurate,” said Fleming. “It gives the wrong picture of how the process actually works, and misses a crucial aspect of the reason for the wonderful efficiency.”

Now I’m no expert, but the bits I italicized in the quote above seem to be saying that every single damn molecule of chlorophyll in every cell of every plant on earth is a highly sophisticated (if single purpose) quantum computer.  That’s pretty damn amazing.  And if that is the case, I am sure that if we poke around a little more, we might find other examples of this sort of thing.  Like in mitochondria, or in neurons.  Wow.


Posted by Buckethead on 04/16/07 at 03:15 AM
The Miracle of Science • Permalink