Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology: McFadden, Johnjoe, Al-Khalili, Jim: 9780307986825: Amazon.com: Books

Life on the Edge is an account of the growing field of quantum biology. The subject is to a certain extent in its academic infancy and no doubt will be an increasing focus for academics in the coming decades. In the book the authors outline certain mechanisms that seem to be a consequence of quantum mechanical phenomenon that various species take advantage of but also discuss broadly how quantum mechanics could intertwine with biology.The authors mix their time with familiarizing the reader with the unintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics and using those analogies to discuss how biology might use them. In the process of reading the book the reader will learn about the wave particle duality of nature as well as coherence and the collapse of the wave function. The authors spend time discussing how the messy and dense environment in the cell is an unintuitive arena for wave functions to propagate as most quantum phenomenon that we know of only retain their wave behavior when they are in isolated environments. At the core of the discussion of the likelihood of quantum biology is a high level perspective on how that might happen and the authors discuss how their might be a quantum resonance at the biological level which enhances wave propagation rather than opposes it. The details of this are much beyond the scope of this book and I am quite sure not worked out in any detail by the authors either as they are fairly radical. The authors discuss the criticisms of quantum biology and the reductionist response that inevitably some aspects of biology will be a function of quantum mechanics as Newtonian mechanics is quantum mechanics in the law of large numbers. Some of their response is convincing and some of it is not. In particular the authors discuss how the magnetic compass in birds that are used for navigation have quantum mechanical origin but then in the full discussion it becomes less and less clear that the mechanism is a fact at all. Other aspects of their discoveries seem quite remarkable; in particular the authors discuss how photosynthesis is catalyzed by a quantum walk by the incoming photon and that the speed by which the catalyst works can only be explained by the photon taking multiple paths. The idea of biology using quantum computation is the most interesting idea in the book and it is used in several places. The authors spend some time on DNA replication and how quantum mechanics might have a roll their in frequency resonance but this is a bit vague as it becomes clear there are many different phenomenon at work. The book effectively is a collection of examples of which all of them are at best partially worked out but in reading the chapters the reader gets a sense of what people are working on and the directions they are taking to attempt to provide solutions to biological mysteries.Life on the Edge gives a new perspective to the interested reader on quantum mechanics in biology. It is a new field that will take time to develop and evolve but in reading the book one gets a sense that there is promise in this research and some of the proposed solutions could offer fascinating solutions to how life allows us to speed up combinatorial dynamics that drive evolution. Very interesting book.

This is one of the most interesting books that I’ve read. It describes how quantum phenomena such as quantum tunneling and quantum entanglement have been shown to be essential to the workings of enzymes, respiration (the respiratory chains), photo synthesis, olfactory neurons, magneto reception in birds and butterflies (and likely other animals), and it plays a role on the functionality of DNA. The authors also speculate that quantum phenomena may one day be able to explain consciousness and the origin of life.The book gives a good layman’s overview of quantum mechanics, the two slit experiment, coherence and decoherence. How quantum waves collapse just by being “observed” can be a mystery even to beginning physics students (been there). For example, why does an electron stop to act like a wave and become a particle when someone attempt to observe it? Well, the wave collapse doesn’t happen because a conscious being decides to take a look. It’s because the act of measurement introduces other items, atoms and particles, into the system in order to perform the observation, and the introduced noise collapses the wave. This is decoherence. However, the quantum systems in biological systems are surrounded by molecules and thus a lot of noise and it seems they shouldn’t be able to maintain their wave characteristics (coherence), but amazingly they do, and the book explains how. All of this is explained gallantly and it is truly fascinating.I have a few minor complaints. On page 185 they write in regards to quantum entanglement “This bizarre feature of the quantum world seems not to respect Einstein’s cosmic speed limit,…”. “Seems” is the keyword. The fact is it doesn’t violate “cosmic speed limit” and they could have added that for clarity and perhaps also explained why that is. They state that “particles can be in two places at the same time”, which is misleading. Quantum mechanics describe the probabilities of finding a particle at specified locations, and these probabilities (arising from quantum waves) are spread out. Well they say that too, but why use the misleading statement? The paragraph on Greenland and the Vikings was misleading since it implied that Greenland was much warmer during the so called “medieval warm period”, and it wasn’t. It was cold when the Vikings got there and it was cold when they left. I should add that the book was written in 2014 and this may not have been well known back then. However, my minor complaints are not enough to take away any stars. It is a great book.They also added a lot of interesting stories about people, animals, and events between all the technical details and explanations, which made the book less dense. The book was very well written and I think it was a lot of fun to read. I highly recommend this book.