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<\/div>\u201cI\u2019m not saying it\u2019s all true,\u201d says Christoph Simon<\/a>, a physicist at the University of Calgary in Canada. \u201cI\u2019m just saying it is not crazy to look for it.\u201d He is talking about the possibility that life<\/a> has found ways to make use of quantum effects in a host of essential phenomena, from photosynthesis<\/a> and the navigational abilities of birds to consciousness<\/a>.<\/p>\n The idea has long been seen as a bit fringe, on the assumption that such fragile effects must quickly disappear in the warm, wet environment of cells<\/a>. Quantumness tends to prosper in very cold systems that are carefully isolated rather than part of a tepid soup awash with other activity.<\/p>\n But that is beginning to change, with tentative evidence for quantum behaviours in the machinery of cells<\/a> and hints that quantum biology may not play by the conventional rules governing the subatomic world, raising new questions about the boundary between the classical and quantum realms.<\/p>\n \u201cYou could say, \u2018well, all molecules are quantum mechanical, so everything in biology is quantum mechanical\u2019,\u201d says Greg Scholes<\/a>, a chemist at Princeton University. But the idea of quantum biology<\/a> only really gets interesting, he says, with the possibility that it explains emergent macroscopic behaviour that can\u2019t be predicted using classical laws.<\/p>\n Finding such behaviour typically means searching for evidence of archetypal quantum traits such as superposition, in which a system appears to exist in multiple states simultaneously before it loses this so-called quantum coherence and \u201ccollapses\u201d into one state or another \u2013 a process called decoherence.<\/p>\nQuantum effects\u2026<\/h2>\n<\/p><\/div>\n