Quantum mechanics allows you to see, feel and touch the particles (1 part)

21. 11. 2018
6th international conference of exopolitics, history and spirituality

Co je to quantum mechanics and how did it begin? If Max Planck did not ignore one bad advice, he would never start a revolution in atomism. The key moment was 1878 when young Planck asked one of his professors whether to pursue a career in physics. Professor Philip von Jolly told Planck to find another job. All the important discoveries in physics have already been made, assured the professor of his young protector.

As Planck recalled later, von Jolly said,

"Physics can continue to be marginal, examining or reorganizing that and that, but the system as a whole is docked and the theoretical physics is getting closer to its end."

By putting one of those little things into practice, it turned out he eventually got it Planck Nobel Prize and she was born quantum mechanics. The uncomfortable little thing involved a very common phenomenon: Why objects emerge in the way they do it during warm up? All materials, regardless of what they are made of, behave the same at rising temperatures - they emerge red, yellow, and finally white. No physicist in 19. century could not explain this seemingly simple process.

The problem appeared to be "ultraviolet catastrophe," because the best theory predicted that objects heated at very high temperatures should emit the most short wavelength energy. Since we know that a strong current does not bring light bulbs into such energy beams of death, physics at 19. There was clearly no last word here.

Energy can be absorbed

Planck found the answer already in 1900 with what became a modern hit. In fact, he thought that energy could be absorbed or transmitted only in discrete quantities, or quantities. It was a radical departure from classical physics that claimed energy flowed through a continuous, continuous stream. At that time, Planck had no theoretical reason, but it also turned out to be working. Its quantum effectively reduced the amount of energy the heated articles could release at any temperature. Finally, no deadly ultraviolet rays!

Quantum Revolution

That's how the quantum revolution began. It took Alberto Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and other physics titans to change Planck's inspiration to a coherent theory, but it was only the beginning, because no one understood what was going on with the objects when they were warming up.

The ultimate theory is quantum mechanics that deals with particle and energy transmission in the smallest realm, derived from our everyday experience and everything that is invisible to our clumsy sensory apparatus. Not everything is totally invisible! Some quantum effects are hidden in sight, although they are bright and beautiful, like sun rays and glitter stars, as something else that could not be fully explained before the arrival of quantum mechanics.

How many phenomena from the quantum world can we experience in our everyday life? What information can our senses discover in the real nature of reality? After all, as the original theory shows, quantum phenomena can lie right under our nose. In fact, they can happen right in our nose.

Quantum bumper

What happens in your nose when you wake up and feel the smell of coffee or a slice of bread in your immortal toaster? For this sensory organ on the face, it's just an impression. Just as Enrico Fermi, who built the first nuclear reactor in the world, once fried the onion, it would be nice to understand how our sensory organ works.

Quantum Mechanics (© Jay Smith)

So you lie in bed and think about preparing fresh toasted toast. Fragrance molecules flow through the air. Your breathing will pull some of these molecules into the nasal cavity between your eyes just above the mouth. The molecules are attached to the mucosal layer on the surface of the nasal cavity and trapped in the olfactory receptors. The olfactory nerves hang from the brain like jellyfish, they are the only part of the central nervous system that is constantly exposed to the outside world.

What happens next is not entirely clear. We know that fragrance molecules bind to any of 400's various receptors on the surface of the mucosa, we do not know exactly how and how this contact creates our sense of smell. Why is it so difficult to understand the smell?

Andrew Horsfield, a scientist at Imperial College London, says:

"This is partly because of the difficulty of conducting experiments to investigate what is happening inside the olfactory receptors."

How the smell works

The conventional explanation for how scent works seems simple: receptors take on very specific shapes of molecules. They are like locks that can only be opened with the right keys. According to this theory, each of the molecules that enters the nose fits into a set of receptors. The brain interprets a unique combination of molecule-activated receptors, such as the smell of coffee. In other words, we feel the shapes of the molecules! However, there is a fundamental problem with the 'key opening' model. '

Horsfield says:

"You can have molecules with very different shapes and compositions that all give you the same feeling."

It seems that something more than just shape must be involved, but what? A controversial alternative to this model suggests that our sense is activated not only by the shape of the molecules, but also by the way these molecules vibrate. All molecules constantly vibrate at a certain frequency, based on their structure. Could our nose somehow reveal the differences in those vibrational frequencies? Luca Turin, a biophysicist at Alexander Fleming's Biomedical Research Center in Greece, believes they can.

Vibration theory of the scent

Turin, who has also become one of the world's leading perfume specialists, has been inspired by the vibrational fragrance theory first proposed by chemist Malcolm Dyson in 1938. After Torino first captured Dyson's idea in the nineties, he began to search for molecules to test this theory. He focused on sulfur compounds that have a unique odor and characteristic molecular vibrations. Turin then needed to identify a totally unrelated compound, with a molecular shape other than sulfur, but with the same vibrational frequency to see if there was anything like sulfur. Eventually one found a molecule containing boron. She must have smelled like sulfur. "Here I'm doing it," he says, "I think it can not be a coincidence."

From the moment he discovered this olfactory sensation, Turin had gathered experimental evidence to support the idea, and had worked with Horsfield to work out theoretical details. Five years ago, Turin and his colleagues designed an experiment in which some of the hydrogen molecules in a fragrance were replaced by deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen with a neutron in the nucleus, and found that people could feel such a difference. Because hydrogen and deuterium have the same molecular shapes but different vibrational frequencies, the results again suggest that our noses can actually detect vibrations. Experiments with fruit flies have shown similar results.

Do we also feel vibration?

Turin's idea remains controversial - his experimental data was shared by an interdisciplinary community of olfactory researchers. But if they are right, and besides shapes, we also feel the vibration, how do our noses do? Turin speculated that a quantum effect could be included here, called tunneling. In quantum mechanics, electrons and all other particles have a dual nature - each is both particle and wave. This sometimes allows the movement of electrons through materials like a tunnel, in a way that would be banned by particles according to the rules of classical physics.

The molecular vibration of the odor can provide an energy jump down the energy that electrons need to jump from one part of the odor receptor to another. The speed of the jump changes with different molecules, which causes nerve impulses that create in the brain the perception of different odors.

So our nose can be a sophisticated electronic detector. How could our noses evolve to take advantage of such quantum peculiarities?

Turin says:

"I think we underestimate this technology, to say a few lines. Four billion years of research and development with unlimited funding is a long time for evolution. But I do not think it's the most amazing thing that life does. "

Quantum mechanics

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