Recent content by Billyneutron

Thanks guys, and I appreciate your patience with me! Consider this hypothetical overly-simplified example. Let's say an electron can occupy two positions (double well) in a protein, separated by an energy barrier. A wave function would then describe probability amplitudes of finding the...

Thanks for the reply. My question is more general, though. A particle in superposition collapses to one state. Does the wave function give any information/probability which "state" the particle will end up in following collapse?

Hi. I have a simple question- Does the wave function describe probability of finding a particle in a certain state upon collapse of the wave function?

anyone?

In the classic experiment, light impinges on half-silvered mirror, the mirror reflects just half the light and transmits the rest. The photon before encounter with the mirror is [A>, then afterwards it evolves according to U to become [B> + i[C> (where C is the reflected light). The...

What would you say are the top 5 "hallmark"/landmark experiments in physics?

Thanks. I'm trying to understand this in the context of quantum tunneling, superposition. Could you say that the electron can be predicted to occupy both wells, and that this is superposition-- implying that the protein, which can be in one of two confirmations depending on the location of...

Could someone articulate what a "double-well" potential is, in this context: An electrostatic map (of a protein) reveled two regions of positive potential surrounded by negative potential. This structure may provide a local double-well potential for mobile electron transfer within the protein

ionic wave propagation along microtubules Thanks for the reply. The first order derivative (V') is plotted vs voltage potential, V. I guess I'm unclear where the motivation for this plot stems from and how this plot implies the possibility of soliton wave solution.

Hammeroff/Penrose seem to be the two main pioneers of this (apparently radical) idea recently. The main beef against it is that coherence times will be too short under physiological conditions. However, recently, long lived quantum coherence was showed in photosynthesis in a PNAS paper...

I appreciate the responses, and sorry for breaking the rules. Could any of you give me an idea what the plot "says" even though you may completely disagree with the premise of the paper?

Last few pages..

Hi. I'm not even sure if I'm posting this in the best forum! I'm having a lot of trouble grasping parts of this paper.. Eur Biophys J. 2009 Jun;38(5):637-47. Epub 2009 Mar 4. A nonlinear model of ionic wave propagation along microtubules. Specifically, they use a phase space plot that...