I'd like to introduce you to an emerging area of science.
One that is still speculative, but hugely exciting.
It's certainly one that's growing very rapidly.
Quantum biology asks a very simple question.
Does quantum mechanics, that weird and wonderful, and powerful theory
of the subatomic world of atoms and molecules
that underpins so much of modern physics and chemistry, also play
a role inside the living cell?
On other words, are there processes, mechanisms, phenomena in living organisms
that can only be explained with a helping hand from quantum mechanics.
Now, quantum biology isn't new. It's been around since the early 1930s.
But its only in the last decade or so, that careful experiments
in biochemistry labs, using spectroscopy that have shown clear, firm evidence
that there are certain specific mechanisms that require quantum mechanics
to explain them.
Quantum biology brings together quantum physicists, biochemists,
molecular biologists.
It's a very interdisciplinary field.
I come from quantum physics. So, I'm a nuclear physicist.
I've spent more than three decades trying to get my head around quantum mechanics.
One of the founders of quantum mechanics, Neil Bohr said,
If you're not astonished by it, then you haven't understood it.
So, I sort of feel happy that I'm still astonished by it and that's a good thing.
But it means I study the very smallest structures in the universe.
The building blocks of reality.
If we think about the scale of size, start with something, an everyday object
like the tennis ball, and just go down orders of magnitude and size.
From the eye of a needle, down to a cell, down to a bacterium, down to an enzyme.
You eventually reach the nano world.
Now, nanotechnology may be a term you've heard of.
A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.
My area is the atomic nucleus, which is the tiny dot inside an atom.
It's even smaller in scale.
This is the domain of quantum mechanics, and physicists and chemists have had
a long time to get used to it.
Biologists on the other hand have got off lightly, in my view.
They are very happy with their balls-and-sticks models of molecules.
(Laughter)
The balls are the atoms, the sticks are the bonds between the atoms
and when they can't build them physically in the lab,
nowadays they have very powerful computers that will simulate a huge model.
This is a protein made up of 100,000 atoms.
It doesn't really require much in the way of quantum mechanics to explain it.
Quantum mechanics was developed in the 1920s.
It is a set of beautiful and powerful mathematical rules and ideas
that explain the world of the very small.
And it's a world that very different from our everyday world
made up of trillions of atoms.
It's a world built on probability and chance.
It's a fuzzy world.
It's a world of phantoms, where particles can also behave like spread out waves.
If we imagine quantum mechanics or quantum physics, then as
the fundamental foundation of reality itself.
That's not really surprising that we say quantum physics
underpins organic chemistry.
After all, it gives us the rules that tells us the rules that tell us
how the atoms fit together to make organic molecules.
Organic chemistry, scaled up in complexity gives us molecular biology,
which of course leads to life itself.
So, in a way, it's sort of not surprising.
It's almost trivial.
Say, well of course life ultimately must depend of quantum mechanics
-- so does everything else.
So does all inanimate matter, made up of trillions of atoms.
Ultimately, there's a quantum level that we know where we have to delve
into this weridness.
But in everyday life, we can forget about it.
Because once you put together trillions of atom, that quantum weirdness
just dissolves away.