Quantum. It's the magic word in TV science fiction. Scientists are just discovering it's Mother Nature's magic, as well.
With a moment of consideration it should not be surprising that the amazing development tool of evolution would come to use the weirdest, but most efficient energy handling scheme in the Universe.
I won't try to explain quantum behavior because I can't; small libraries could be made entirely of books to introduce quantum concepts, books written by people who know more about it than I do, books that fail to make quantum physics easy to understand. Not to worry, I only intend to talk about one quantum feature - Quantum Entanglement (QE).
Entanglement. One tenet of quantum physics is that you can't know both the location AND vector of any particle at the same time. There exists a fundamental blur of uncertainty when we look that closely at reality. Odd, but it gets odder. Two particles, photons for instance, who encounter each other closely enough will temporarily blur together. The photons become confused which is which, even after they become separated, and this is entanglement. For a time, vibrate one and they both react; measure one, and the other, no matter how far away, will instantly display identical measurements.
Science is struggling to find ways to use this potentially powerful state of entanglement, but Mother Nature is way ahead of us.
Nerve cells and neurons are different from the other cells in the body. Their special shape allowing connection to other nerves requires special internal structures. The chemo-electric signals passing from nerve cell to nerve cell jumps along an internal support structure called they cytoskeleton. Recently it has been shown that the cytoskeleton traps individual entangled photons in an internal tube. Even more recently scientists have become involved in an extensive argument whether or not these quantum structures are useless and accidental, or an important part of what makes humans intelligent.
Similar structures have just now been discovered in photosynthetic cells. Searching for how energy is so perfectly transferred within plants, researchers stumbled on what may be another application of QE by Mother Nature. It seems that QE on a huge scale might allow a kind of 'wireless' energy transmission during photosynthesis.
Yes, it's weird, but it's in your head, so get used to it. Computers using QE will be thousands of times faster than present technology. QE may allow for instant communication over any distance with total security, for everything from cellphones to interplanetary probes to robot avatars. QE could even allow power transmission from your power plant directly to your electric car, laptop computer, flashlight, or pocket outlet.
We know so little about the QE phenomena we don't have a handle on what might be bad about it. If QE helps manage a person's memories, could such memories be seen by a QE reader? Or even recorded? Or even more terrifying possibilities - hacked, altered, or erased?
The bad always comes with the good, another lesson from Mother Nature. She has possibly shown us the way to a new, brighter era for man, but don't forget Her dark side.
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