Here are my slides for the UQ Physics Colloquium. I have tried to build it around 5 key ideas:
1. Truly quantum dynamics requires phase coherence.
2. We can quantify quantum decoherence of excited states of optically active biomolecules. (Decoherence arises due to dielectric relaxation of the surrounding protein and water.)
3. Quantum dynamics is determined by competition between system timescale [which creates superposition state] and time scales of the environment.
4. There are significant scientific reasons to be skeptical about these claims of “quantum biology”.
5. The real scientific challenges for understanding are defining and solving realistic effective Hamiltonians for specific functional processes.
The key reference is a 2008 Review article I wrote with Joel Gilmore.
Overall I feel there is too much material, some of it is too technical, ...
I welcome feedback.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
From Leo Szilard to the Tasmanian wilderness
Richard Flanagan is an esteemed Australian writer. My son recently gave our family a copy of Flanagan's recent book, Question 7 . It is...
-
Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro...
-
If you look on the arXiv and in Nature journals there is a continuing stream of people claiming to observe superconductivity in some new mat...
-
I welcome discussion on this point. I don't think it is as sensitive or as important a topic as the author order on papers. With rega...
Do you see any other areas where computational results are being oversold? Do you have a general rule of thumb for judging at which point a theoretical result becomes relevant?
ReplyDeleteA more accurate and less pompous statement might have been: the key reference on the subject which I am so blithely dismissing happens to cover only a small part of the field and was by the merest accident written by me etc.
ReplyDelete