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Comment by ggchappell | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article.

I wonder about parts of it:

> Various scientists have pointed out that photosynthesis and bird navigation must rely on quantum effects ....

After looking at the 2 linked articles (links are just after the above sentence in this article), I would say the word "must" above is incorrect. In both of the linked articles, researchers are speculating on quantum effects in bird navigation & photosynthesis.

Also, it seems odd to talk about "rely[ing] on quantum effects". If quantum mechanics is the way the world works, then everything is a "quantum effect". It's not like the universe has quantum parts and classical parts (is it?).

EDIT: Let's make that a more serious question. Is it?

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I can't find the article but recently there as a very elegant experiment proving that quantum teleportation is used by enzymatic action.

I think it was just matter of calculating how fast a chemical reaction would sped up by and enzyme that uses quantum effects.

And the way it was done used heavy water because that would have fewer quantum jumps. And the reaction slowed down by exactly as much as the theory predicted. Thus confirming that enzymes most likely do make use of quantum teleporation.

But that's obviously not entanglement.

EDIT: Found this: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_quantum_shortcut...

Here's an attempt at distinguishing a truly quantum effect: can the same thing happen in a universe with classical physical laws and also keeping the other relevant variables fixed?(the latter part is important because the classical universe is, of course, turing complete).

Also, there is a similar programming qn. Suppose you have a program P running on a machine Q, and the api for a machine C is implemented on Q, so that programs for C can be run on Q. How do we actually figure out if P is really a C program running on Q?

As far as we know, no, it's quantum all the way down. If you zoom in really close you can see the quata of everything, like looking at a newspaper with a magnifying glass - you can see the dots. If you zoom back out to our level, everything looks classical - you can just see the newspaper.

They mean that they way it works couldn't work in a non-quantum world.

Considering we live in a quantum world that just means you can approximate the same thing in a non-quantum world. It might not seem like a big deal, but thinking about earth's orbit in a pure Newtonian world is still wrong. As is friction and wind resistance.

What I am trying to say is when someone says it works in a non-quantum viewpoint, they just mean you can approximate the first few decimal places without looking at QM. But, saying it works is not accurate.

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