Learning. Space. History. Reading-list. Is Quantum Mechanics Controlling Your Thoughts? Elated by the finding, researchers are looking to mimic nature’s quantum ability to build solar energy collectors that work with near-photosynthetic efficiency.
Alán Aspuru-Guzik, an assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, heads a team that is researching ways to incorporate the quantum lessons of photosynthesis into organic photovoltaic solar cells. This research is in only the earliest stages, but Aspuru-Guzik believes that Fleming’s work will be applicable in the race to manufacture cheap, efficient solar power cells out of organic molecules. TUNNELING FOR SMELL Quantum physics may explain the mysterious biological process of smell, too, says biophysicist Luca Turin, who first published his controversial hypothesis in 1996 while teaching at University College London. In the quantum world, an electron from one biomolecule might hop to another, though classical laws of physics forbid it. Our world may be a giant hologram.
DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment.
From the outside, it doesn't look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres. For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves - ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes.
GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.