I am skeptical of the grand and speculative claims of "quantum biology".
There is a nice paper in PNAS which systematically considers the specific claim that smell is based on sensing the vibrational frequencies of particular molecules, and rebuts it from both theoretical and experimental points of view.
Implausibility of the vibrational theory of olfaction
Eric Block, Seogjoo Jang, Hiroaki Matsunami, Sivakumar Sekharan, Bérénice Dethier, Mehmed Z. Ertem, Sivaji Gundala, Yi Pan, Shengju Li, Zhen Li, Stephene N. Lodge, Mehmet Ozbil, Huihong Jiang, Sonia F. Penalba, Victor S. Batista, and Hanyi Zhuang.
I thank Suggy Jang for bringing the paper to my attention.
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Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro... -
Nitrogen fluoride (NF) seems like a very simple molecule and you would think it would very well understood, particularly as it is small enou... -
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...
methinks you may be a little out of your intellectual comfort zone here
ReplyDeletesorry, forgot to sign my comment which I always do. My full name is Luca Turin and my email lucaturin@me.com if you want to get in touch.
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