Animal Navigation and Photosyntheisis Powered by Quantum Physics

Bird navigation, plant photosynthesis and the human sense of smell are all ways living things appear to exploit the oddities of quantum physics, scientists are finding. "Down at that level, everything is pretty darn weird," Seth Lloyd, professor of quantum mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said "Electrons can be in two places in once, or five places at once, or a thousand places at once. And then there are these funky quantum effects like 'entanglement,' where two different systems can have more information about each other than they have any right to have under classical mechanics."

In the case of human smell, it appears that receptors are triggered in part by "phonons" — tiny vibrational phenomena that provide the extra energy needed to create a signal that we recognize as a scent. "This process, which is called phonon-assisted tunnelling, is a purely quantum mechanical process," Lloyd said. "It can't be explained by ordinary classical models."

Lloyd said quantum mechanics likely plays a key role in vision as well, because vision systems in animals are sensitive to individual quantum particles of light called photons. Meanwhile, birds like the European robin have an internal compass that helps them navigate, and it appears to make use of quantum entanglement — a linkage of two or more very small objects so that any change to one is immediately experienced by another, no matter how far apart they are.

Lloyd said birds can sense the orientation of the Earth's magnetic field, but can't tell the difference between north or south, and become disoriented by oscillating magnetic fields like microwaves. Physics experiments show that certain entangled electrons are also very sensitive to the orientation of weak magnetic fields, and the birds' behavior suggests they are using that to navigate.