Professors Anton and Hansen reflect / deconstruct the Susskind Paradigm
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Jason Palmer: Quantum physics explanation for smell gains traction
The theory that our sense of smell has its basis in quantum physics events is gaining traction, say researchers.
The idea remains controversial, but scientists reporting at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, are slowly unpicking how it could work.
The key, they say, is tiny packets of energy, or quanta, lost by electrons.
Experiments using tiny wires show that as electrons move on proteins within the nose, odor molecules could absorb these quanta and thereby be detected.
If the theory is right, by extending these studies, an “electronic nose” superior to any chemical sensor could be devised.
Lock and key
The means by which a detected molecule is translated into a smell within the brain has already been the subject of Nobel prize-winning research.
But how precisely an odorant molecule is detected remains a mystery.
As with the picture of molecular interactions that drives our understanding of enzymes and drugs, the very shape of odorant molecules has been assumed to be the way it is detected in the nose.
Jason Palmer: Quantum mechanics rule ‘bent’ in classic experiment
Researchers have bent one of the most basic rules of quantum mechanics, a counterintuitive branch of physics that deals with atomic-scale interactions.
Its “complementarity” rule asserts that it is impossible to observe light behaving as both a wave and a particle, though it is strictly both.
In an experiment reported in Science, researchers have now done exactly that.
They say the feat “pulls back the veil” on quantum reality in a way that was thought to be prohibited by theory.
Quantum mechanics has spawned and continues to fuel spirited debates about the nature of what we can see and measure, and what nature keeps hidden – debates that often straddle the divide between the physical and the philosophical.
For instance, a well-known rule called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle maintains that for some pairs of measurements, high precision in one necessarily reduces the precision that can be achieved in the other.
One embodiment of this idea lies in a “two-slit interferometer”, in which light can pass through one of two slits and is viewed on a screen.