The Biocentric Universe Theory: Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos Itself

Don't forget this is only one person's theory, but the information within is really important because it brings science and philosophy together for once. I'm not saying the entire theory is correct or wrong but many things start to make sense if you take this information in.

But fossils require humans to be found and observed also. If we expect to find fossils we will, see how it works? How did we start digging for fossils and stuff, someone sometime ago must have found a bone of an animal in the ground and ever since then we have dug and excavated with the expectation of finding something. It has a lot to do with how we think and how we limit ourselves with our thinking, this article and the paper challenge the notion that everything that exists, exists regardless of whether we know it does or not.

The way this has started to raise very important questions about how things really work is great. We have to remember we are influenced by many things, our enviroment and surroundings, the information and knowledge in our minds, the way our brain works and behaves. This is but a small step in the right direction but at the same time it is a huge leap in understanding.

Great Post, OP!!! I've read some of that before, specifically the electrons and their tandem behavior - regardless of distance - but this was a great read on the broader scale as well. Very cool.

On another note...(hehehe - some of you will get this) While reading it, I kept thinking "I wonder if this could explain the why Kate and Sawyer et al are in 1977 and John and Ben et all are in 2007 and how the island can be two places (and two times?) at the same time, etc., etc.." LOL! :)

It's not just electrons, in theory all particles behave as waves and experience quantumn entanglement.

Great show that Lost also, deals with the electromagnetic forces. Also with the "time" travel, the reason they cannot change the future by altering the past is that they never went back in "time" but rather the events of the past were reconstructed for them. One cannot travel back in time because time does not exist. The past only exists in your mind, so if you manage to replicate the events of the past in a physical way, for example some virtual reality machine like a holodeck from star trek, then you could travel back in time. The enourmous power of the EM forces on that island can manipulate any EM radiation on the spectrum, including light. So they are virtually in a holographic existance.

I have been telling people that time does not exist for years, some get it, most do not, but it's hard to accept given that our lives revolve around the cycle of time. But time is only a measurement of motion and change! It is not a force in itself, that is why you cannot travel back or forward in time. And why time seems to move quickly when you are engrossed in something, because you pay no attention to time and yet when you are bored and waiting to escape from your office or classrom or whatever you watch the time like a hawk and it slows to a crawl.

scientifically speaking, we barely see 1% of the known universe. to see beyond space and time, we are to go within ourselves. the spirit carries on.

Does it require a consciousness or just the expectation to hear/see/smell/feel/taste something enough to create the possible potential?


Does the microscope have a consciousness? If yes, then that's all it takes to collapse the wave function. BUT, we don't know for sure without looking into the microscope to see for ourselves.

Even if we don't look, and just have a camera record it, we STILL have to look at the photograph to SEE it. Therefore, it takes a sentient being to observe, even if it's two or three degrees out from the actual "object" being observed.

I'm thinking that the potential of anything and everything is already in existence. Our observations merely "freeze-frame" one of an infinite number of possibilities. Our expectations play a big role in what we ultimately observe. Neutrality might, then, allows us to witness a wider variety of possibilities as we are not limiting the outcome by a narrowed viewpoint. That's where the idea of "thinking outside the box" comes from...or leads to, methinks! ;-)

Great observation, it would explain why so many things that seem so obvious to me and common sensical seem to be ungraspable to people... I have tried to be as objective as I can when it comes to trying to understand the world we live in and how things work. I have almost always thought "outside the box" as you put it, but I don't leave my mind open to all possibilities still, for example I simply cannot believe in anything anymore including god and aliens and all things like that. As much as I would love to see and meet alien beings, being an avid fan of sci-fi, I cannot make myself believe in them until I actually meet one. But then the catch 22 applies...

This also raises another interesting concept, what if the people who say they meet aliens and speak to god, really do, but in their own personaly reality? To them the experience would be very real and they CREATE the experience and that particular reality. I don't have much tolerance for people's beliefs because they cannot be proven or disproven and are like opinions, but this is only because beliefs get in the way of true understanding. But that can be a problem if true understanding of the world is that we create it all...

This would also suggest that people who are trapped in their own minds such as those in mental asylums are really experiencing whatever it is they are experiencing and to them it is real as anything. What makes this reality any different to dreams or visions? They all share the same qualities, we all experience something within them. The only difference is how we see them and how we interpret them. This universal reality we all share is just common ground for us all to interact, I tend to think of personal realities as spherical bubbles around each individual and when people come together the spheres merge into a bigger sphere and everyone experiences a similiar universal reality. I'm not sure where this is going, I'm simply writing automatically as I think.

So, is the island in two PLACES at once, or is it two TIMES at once? It really isn't emphasized whether these two different time-line experiences are going on at the same TIME and we really can't know that either. It's more likely that Kate and Sawyer and Jack are experiencing the island thirty years before Ben and and John are experiencing the island.

Are they in different times or in different space? Or is one set of travelers moving faster than the other?

If there are twins, and one twin goes into outer space for 30 years Earth time, the outer space twin comes back younger than the twin left on earth. Time slows down in outer space. (It may be the opposite, I don't remember which way it goes). But you get my gist. Since there's no absolute time, it is then considered to be "relative" to the experiencer. In other words, time does not an experiencer make, but an experiencer makes time!

Does this go back to the original post about Life making the Universe after all? Seems so..

With this knowledge, it seems as if the twins are both experiencing life without stop (a continuum) but TIME itself acts differently relative to how fast an experiencer is traveling. Time is an illusion.

Man, I'm like Xenos, I think too much and it really gets confusing. hee heee

I'm not sure I follow your point about fossils. The discovery of fossils eventually revealed a prehistoric past. I don't think there would be any other way of knowing that a prehistoric era ever existed. And what about the missing link? That is a puzzle in our evolutionary transition that has yet to be solved. Shouldn't the concept of biocentricism be able to solve that missing transition?

There have been discoveries over the years that continue to challenge our present knowledge of human history. Google Antikythera device or ancient batteries. These are discoveries that don't fit nicely into our knowledge of the past.

Here is an article that I dug up that may be of interest. If anything, I think it provides a nice counterargument to your article, not to suggest that I'm trying to debunk your argument, but hopefully complement a healthy debate and continued good dialogue on an interesting subject.

I'm not looking, honest!
Mar 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition

[link to www.economist.com]

The good news is reality exists. The bad is it’s even stranger than people thought


“HOW wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.” So said Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Since its birth in the 1920s, physicists and philosophers have grappled with the bizarre consequences that his theory has for reality, including the fundamental truth that it is impossible to know everything about the world and, in fact, whether it really exists at all when it is not being observed. Now two groups of physicists, working independently, have demonstrated that nature is indeed real when unobserved. When no one is peeking, however, it acts in a really odd way.

In the 1990s a physicist called Lucien Hardy proposed a thought experiment that makes nonsense of the famous interaction between matter and antimatter—that when a particle meets its antiparticle, the pair always annihilate one another in a burst of energy. Dr Hardy’s scheme left open the possibility that in some cases when their interaction is not observed a particle and an antiparticle could interact with one another and survive. Of course, since the interaction has to remain unseen, no one should ever notice this happening, which is why the result is known as Hardy’s paradox.

This week Kazuhiro Yokota of Osaka University in Japan and his colleagues demonstrated that Hardy’s paradox is, in fact, correct. They report their work in the New Journal of Physics. The experiment represents independent confirmation of a similar demonstration by Jeff Lundeen and Aephraim Steinberg of the University of Toronto, which was published seven weeks ago in Physical Review Letters.

The two teams used the same technique in their experiments. They managed to do what had previously been thought impossible: they probed reality without disturbing it. Not disturbing it is the quantum-mechanical equivalent of not really looking. So they were able to show that the universe does indeed exist when it is not being observed.

The reality in question—admittedly rather a small part of the universe—was the polarisation of pairs of photons, the particles of which light is made. The state of one of these photons was inextricably linked with that of the other through a process known as quantum entanglement.

The polarised photons were able to take the place of the particle and the antiparticle in Dr Hardy’s thought experiment because they obey the same quantum-mechanical rules. Dr Yokota (and also Drs Lundeen and Steinberg) managed to observe them without looking, as it were, by not gathering enough information from any one interaction to draw a conclusion, and then pooling these partial results so that the total became meaningful.

What the several researchers found was that there were more photons in some places than there should have been and fewer in others. The stunning result, though, was that in some places the number of photons was actually less than zero. Fewer than zero particles being present usually means that you have antiparticles instead. But there is no such thing as an antiphoton (photons are their own antiparticles, and are pure energy in any case), so that cannot apply here.

The only mathematically consistent explanation known for this result is therefore Hardy’s. The weird things he predicted are real and they can, indeed, only be seen by people who are not looking. Dr Yokota and his colleagues went so far as to call their results “preposterous”. Niels Bohr, no doubt, would have been delighted.

I feel you've hit the nail on the head. We each are a Universe unto ourselves, but when two like-minded individuals connect, the sphere gets bigger and the "reality" becomes more solidified.

I love your ponderings, so don't stop! We MAY be connected!

hee heeee.....

Reality is to make real. I think that's why it's said that this is all an illusion, because we each make our own reality, but it isn't necessarily the truth. ;-) Is there an Absolute Reality?

Great post-great comments.
Assume for a moment that the theory is viable.

I have to ask
"Did consciousness create the universe. Or did the universe create conciousness"
In either case we are all connected with not only each other and every living thing, but every non-living thing too. From the rock to space dust.

If the universe came first, does it not need a observer to evolve?
If conciousness came first, does it not need desire to experience?

"I'm not sure I follow your point about fossils. The discovery of fossils eventually revealed a prehistoric past. I don't think there would be any other way of knowing that a prehistoric era ever existed. And what about the missing link? That is a puzzle in our evolutionary transition that has yet to be solved. Shouldn't the concept of biocentricism be able to solve that missing transition?

There have been discoveries over the years that continue to challenge our present knowledge of human history. Google Antikythera device or ancient batteries. These are discoveries that don't fit nicely into our knowledge of the past."

I am really trying to get my head wrapped around this whole thing, one moment I think I understand and the next confusion sets in. In one way the theory is sneaky but in another it is profound.

It is hard to say with certainty until I know what constitutes as an observer, whether it can be anything from an ant up to a human. Since we do not know for sure whether animals have consciousness, I cannot say what makes an observer an observer other than the requirement of being aware of the self. So since humans like to feel special let's say for now only humans can be an observer, start small and simple. We don't know for sure how long humans have been around, the Aboriginal people in my country have been around since at least 40,000 years ago. The planet itself has been around for 4+ billion years, that is a long "time" for a lot of events and changes. So humans have been observing since humans existed, whenever that began. This would limit the observing to the existance of humans. If other creatures can be observers too then observation and the creation of universal and personal realities have existed since life began.

BTW the evolutionary theory is just that, a theory, most theories where things are missing or do not add up are usually flawed, sometimes the whole theory but usually just parts. It is human nature to try make their observations fit with their theories nowdays instead of making observations and creating theories.

But then you might be asking, how did it all begin in the first place, which is the big question and no one has ever been able to answer and we might never know. Is there a universal consciousness? That became aware of itself and thus created life. Another endless cycle, life creates life creates life. From the top to the bottom. If only humans can observe than the article you posted suggests that there is another observer that is not human, a universal consciousness... Or if other creatures are also observers then it might suggest that there were creatures observing, like a fly on the wall kind of thing.

You have strange timing, I was typing out my response to you it seems before I even saw your post! This really is getting strange yet so interesting. Thanks for your interest and input. Just took a while to type what I had to say because things don't get any more confusing then this... Really putting my mind into overdrive.

Last Edited by Xenus on 05/04/2009 05:36 PM

It's the ghost in the machine, hehe.

The theory of a science that explains everything has long been sought after and maybe biocentrism has brought us closer, but I don't think we're quite there yet. Like evolution, Biocentrism doesn't have all the answers. It has its flaws just like evolution. But it is a relatively new theory, it has new and intriguing concepts that answer some problems that other disciplines could not, so should not be easily discounted. A universal consciousness is interesting but takes the science of biology out of the equation. Maybe Cosmocentrism? Lol! Who knows?

The only way such a theory would be possible would be if people stopped being so segregated and divided and worked together to share information and ideas, freely. In science you have to stick to a certain field, with little or not interaction with other fields. Whenever different fields of science come together they create major breakthroughs. But the way everything is right now, no chance in hell that will happen. These forums are a good way for that to happen, even though we might not be scientists or "experts" we have brains and mind and access to a wealth of information via the internet.

yes it doesn't matter unless we want to split hairs.

but consciousness never 'came' first. consciousness IS.

The double-slit experiment also opened up another can of worms that, it seems, no one has really touched upon here. It has made the concept of a 6000 year old earh more viable than ever. The double slit showed that when one of the slits is, indeed, covered--that "particle" will find a vortice to enter into and REACH the back BEFORE the original particle does. This is, amazingly, effect before cause. The limiting factor, to science, was that the speed of light was not FAST ENOUGH to reach the outer reaches of the universe in just 6000 years. That is now a distinct POSSIBILITY rather than the IMPOSSIBILITY that science made it out to be. If, then, the 6000-year postulate is correct; AND the possibility of manipulating our universe is correct--THEN this creates a whole new set of possibilities. Namely, when Jesus said that if we believe that we can move a mountain, we can ACTUALLY move that mountain. It is not just an analogy. Therefore, we can also heal diseases, change hearts, raise from the dead, etc.

This is, in fact, exactly why the universe was CREATED exactly as it is. No one who is yet able to overcome their inherited tendencies to do evil will EVER be able to manipulate the world around them in the positive ways you are all talking about here. The ROMANTIC ideas of time travel into the past or future is simply that--romantic. There is a way to travel into the past and future--just not in the ways that s/f novels have depicted. The only way into either the past or future is through the NOW--just as God's Kingdom and His very nature proclaim that the great I AM exists simultaneously "before Abraham was" and far into the future when the saints are enjoying the kingdom.

Any "saint" worth his salt today knows that he is changing his universe. It is not a question of knowing "how". That is all outlined for us to accomplish through "faith". Faith is swallowed up in victory. Faith becomes assurance because God's word (worked out IN us) "does not return to Him void". There are results and consequences of following the dictates of our conscience. This is why the "liberty of conscience" is so important today because this is how the world changes. Without liberty of conscience in countries like Arabia, there is virtually no change for CENTURIES and even MILLENIA as in the case of total domination of the Catholic system during the dark ages. The liberty of our conscience took America through dizzying change and ALL OF IT for the better of mankind--opening up the way for a purer display of freedom and love to the entire world. We became the model for the rest of the world based on our freedom of conscience. That very basic concept is now under attack via the concept of a New World Order that eliminates the idea and homogenizes us together for the sake of "peace" and "prosperity". It will not accomplish its goal but for "one hour". It is not "wars and rumors of wars", plagues and pestilences, or any petty dictator who will bring on the final events foretold(and therefore "fullfil the vision",) it is the all-powerful abilities of the true saints who will bring on the end of the world as we know it by changing the reality all around us. This is not something we WILL have--WHEN. It is something we all have NOW. It is going on all around you and you may not even see it. It is called Latter Rain and it is falling abundantly NOW. MASSIVE changes are happening NOW. It is foretold in scripture that the events will be very quick ones. It is happening so fast, it is making my head spin. This is one of the major reasons I even come here--to check the pulse of the world. In the end, there will be just four classes. There will be the "holy" and the "righteous", and there will be the wicked and the unclean. No fence-straddlers will even see the light of day. If you are not attempting to recreate your world today, it may be too late tonight. To day is the "day of salvation" and Jesus is the only name under heaven that can change your world. ALL the others have failed and will continue to fail FOREVER. Jesus is the only one who tells you HOW.

Another take on the matter:

A Theory of Everything: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, & Mathematics. [link to en.wikipedia.org]

This is exactly what I am talking about in regards to balance. It is easy to take sides it is harder to stand in the middle and take the balanced view or choice. When you live 'out of balance' you create dis-ease in your reality which in turn will make you more unstable and will in the end make you, not in control. Only through balance can you gain full control of yourself.

The most important thing is to 'Know' yourself, for all your negative traits and all your positive traits, once you know all your strengths and weaknesses and learn when to use either to obtain balance, then you become in control, with no fear, just knowing.

Think of it like a sea-saw, the balance point is the middle. Once the sea-saw has momentum it swings from up to down and so on, only ever reaching the balance point for a second on each up or down motion. The choices we make will determine which way the sea-saw swings. If you live your life with too much positive, ignoring the negative, you may reach the top of the sea-saw, but from there, there is only one way to go-down. On the other hand if you focus too much on the negative you will reach-rock bottom, which is harder to then find the fight to get the momentum going again to rise back up. The key is to find balance, to know when to take a positive choice or negative choice to keep this balance (With-out intentionally harming anyone along the way).

So True, So Difficult, We've Been Thoroughly Trained, Well Behaved Little Creators Under Someone's Thumb...

[link to www.hypnoticmp3.com]

There is another active thread today about someone feeling connected to an
'etheric internet' . . .

Yes the scientists know everythying. We are by chance, since we don't have all the answers then we assume it is fact.(evolution) Disclaimer: side effects may be nausea, bleeding, sorethroat, abdominal cramps and occasional fever..That's the same brilliant scientists who have allowed us to live longer with medication that prolongs our suffering while the pharmaceuticals make their trillions.Real advances here. Don't believe shit they say, they have an agenda to tell people they are simply here as random chance, so morales do not apply, be free....

Great points...I have my own theory about our Losties and 'not being able to change the past' (Whatever Happened, Happened - WHH, or no paradoxes allowed) - and it relates to this from the original post:

"When we measure one particle and thus collapse its wave function, the other particle’s wave function instantaneously collapses too. If one photon is observed to have a vertical polarization (its waves all moving in one plane), the act of observation causes the other to instantly go from being an indefinite probability wave to an actual photon with the opposite, horizontal polarity—even if the two photons have since moved far from each other."
--------------------------

I like the various time line theory - but that the universe still corrects - like the photons balancing out the chaos (which could simply be the act of observation). Chaos--->Order - kind of like our little particles balancing out regardless of space/time.

Remember the first time we saw Eloise, Desmond was buying a ring. Then there was the whole scene where the guy was killed by the scaffolding or something. She told Desmond that it was useless to try to change that - she was telling Desmond this, sort of preparing him for his own 'flashes' with Charlie i.e., in one timeline Charlie died from lighting, etc...but in THIS timeline Charlie dies at the Looking Glass.

It's as if Eloise (and maybe Charles et al) have tried changing this many times, but it never really works out the way she wishes.

I think "Whatever Happened, Happened" (WHH) is multi-faceted. The variables can change, but the end result (the constant) doesn't. Like Desmond saving Charlie over and over....the 'how' Charlie dies changed, but the fact that Charlie still died didn't. Like x+y=z: 3 + 3 = 6; 4 + 2 also = 6. 3, 4, and 2 are variables....6 is the constant.

So, each timeline has different variables, but the constant remains the same. So WHH is true, AND one can also change the past as well. Both are true, but both end up with the same result. What HAPPENED happens - it's just the details surrounding what 'happens' that can change.

That makes sense in this 'LOST' world to me Chaos ----> Order. The Chaos is the variable change - the Order is What Happened.

Could it be a fictional insight into the biocentric universe? Perhaps....

Wooooo Hooooooo! :-)

Yes, the CONSTANT. Might we correlate this to DESTINY?

If, in fact, there is an ultimate END (effect) to every cause, then the means to get to that result can change a zillion times but will ultimately end as "programmed". So, our FREE-WILL amounts to being able to coerce the means to the end, not the end itself.

Of course this is speculation, but perhaps that's what Jesus meant by His statement, "I am the Alpha and the Omega." ???

I think we're getting somewhere. :-)

The movie, The Butterfly Effect, was also testimony to your theory about Chaos and Order. Except he kept doing things differently to change the effects until he realized he had to change the CAUSE! How this was portrayed may not be correct scientifically OR spiritually, but it made its point. It also may be addressing Xeno's original ponderings about why we can't seem to get things right here on Earth even though most of us we really really want to enjoy peace and happiness; that we want to change the REALITY we are experiencing

Perhaps peace was never in the Original Cause?

Can we change the CAUSE?

S.

EDIT:
I have pondered a bit more, and think that maybe Peace and Unity IS in the Original Cause, but we're all still in the midst of experiencing and trying to change the Effects! I would speculate that since we all seem to have this nagging idea FOR peace, that it is built-in to our SELF on some level, and keeps us searching for that END!

Whew! :-)

Last Edited by Wingman on 05/06/2009 11:51 AM

The earth will never have peace all over, because this world is based on balance. You cannot have positive without the negative.. As much as we have people who genuinely would love to live in what they would call a 'peaceful world', on the other scale there are others who will always give into their darker sides. We all have the ability to choose which side you use, but the key is to find the balance between the two and to learn to use both to make the best possible choices.

We live in a world of chaos, it is all around us, the key is to find balance.

Life I can see is based on experiences, whether we live through them or live through an experience in the form of a fabricated reality, like a book, a movie or a video game or dream. Most of these fabricated realities rely on conflict to provide drama and entertainment, conflict is the easiest way to engage an audience. The conflict can be physical, mental(conflict of interests or ideas etc) or verbal.

Also, this is really obvious now that I think about it, but the bubble of personal reality each person has, could that be our very own magnetic field? The one our bodies produce? It's there and has been measured and "seen" before. Magnetism can affect light, light is just ElectroMagnetic radiation. Light is what we perceive the world around us with. This with the ideas of the holographic universe theory becomes very interesting.

And can we use it? Maybe we need to understand the interactions (if any) between this field and the universal reality in order to use it.

This is the same conclusion I came to myself, years ago, it is very true. How would you know how to make decisions and "act"/re-act to certain situations if you did not know what you will affect and how? If we did not have evil/darkness how could we ever know what NOT to do and how not to act unless we witness it ourselves? How can we make an informed decision on how to be if we never see what the results of certain "act"ions are?

All the people who align themselves with light and refuse to see the darkness or have anything to do with "darkness" are simply closing themselves off to only a one sided experience with perhaps very bad results, if not for themselves then another. Not only that but if the world really had a balance of "energies" (funnily enough our atmosphere has such a thing in science) then it would auto balance and perhaps create a situation in someone's life which turns them to the opposite extreme. We are all indivi"dual"s in a dualistic/polarised reality. I wonder if we can ever be individuals without the duality. A mass consciousness/hive mind does not really appeal to me, but neither does this duality.


Bonus points to anyone who gets my use of wordplay and etymology :)

Is Quantum Mechanics Controlling Your Thoughts?

Science's weirdest realm may be responsible for photosynthesis, our sense of smell, and even consciousness itself. by Mark Anderson

Graham Fleming sits down at an L-shaped lab bench, occupying a footprint about the size of two parking spaces. Alongside him, a couple of off-the-shelf lasers spit out pulses of light just millionths of a billionth of a second long. After snaking through a jagged path of mirrors and lenses, these minus­cule flashes disappear into a smoky black box containing proteins from green sulfur bacteria, which ordinarily obtain their energy and nourishment from the sun. Inside the black box, optics manufactured to billionths-of-a-meter precision detect something extraordinary: Within the bacterial proteins, dancing electrons make seemingly impossible leaps and appear to inhabit multiple places at once.

Peering deep into these proteins, Fleming and his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley and at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered the driving engine of a key step in photosynthesis, the process by which plants and some microorganisms convert water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight into oxygen and carbohydrates. More efficient by far in its ability to convert energy than any operation devised by man, this cascade helps drive almost all life on earth. Remarkably, photosynthesis 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.

On the face of things, quantum mechanics and the biological sciences do not mix. Biology focuses on larger-scale processes, from molecular interactions between proteins and DNA up to the behavior of organisms as a whole; quantum mechanics describes the often-strange nature of electrons, protons, muons, and quarks—the smallest of the small. Many events in biology are considered straightforward, with one reaction begetting another in a linear, predictable way. By contrast, quantum mechanics is fuzzy because when the world is observed at the subatomic scale, it is apparent that particles are also waves: A dancing electron is both a tangible nugget and an oscillation of energy. (Larger objects also exist in particle and wave form, but the effect is not noticeable in the macroscopic world.)

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. Physicists describe quantum reality in an equation they call the wave function, which reflects all the potential ways a system can evolve. 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. (This process of influence at a distance is what physicists call entanglement.) As in a game of dominoes, alteration of one particle affects the next one, and so on.

The implications of all this are mind-bending. In the macro world, a ball never spontaneously shoots itself over a wall. In the quantum world, though, an electron in one biomolecule might hop to a second biomolecule, even though classical laws of physics hold that the electrons are too tightly bound to leave. The phenomenon of hopping across seemingly forbidden gaps is called quantum tunneling.

From tunneling to entanglement, the special properties of the quantum realm allow events to unfold at speeds and efficiencies that would be unachievable with classical physics alone. Could quantum mechanisms be driving some of the most elegant and inexplicable processes of life? For years experts doubted it: Quantum phenomena typically reveal themselves only in lab settings, in vacuum chambers chilled to near absolute zero. Biological systems are warm and wet. Most researchers thought the thermal noise of life would drown out any quantum weirdness that might rear its head.

Yet 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.

INTO THE LIGHT
One of the most significant quantum observations in the life sciences comes from Fleming and his collaborators. Their study of photosynthesis in green sulfur bacteria, published in 2007 in Nature [subscription required], tracked the detailed chemical steps that allow plants to harness sunlight and use it to convert simple raw materials into the oxygen we breathe and the carbohydrates we eat. Specifically, the team examined the protein scaffold connecting the bacteria’s external solar collectors, called the chlorosome, to reaction centers deep inside the cells. Unlike electric power lines, which lose as much as 20 percent of energy in transmission, these bacteria transmit energy at a staggering efficiency rate of 95 percent or better.

The secret, Fleming and his colleagues found, is quantum physics. More: [link to discovermagazine.com]