E-Book Overview
Life is the most extraordinary phenomenon in the known universe; but how did it come to be? Even in an age of cloning and artificial biology, the remarkable truth remains: nobody has ever made anything living entirely out of dead material. Life remains the only way to make life. Are we still missing a vital ingredient in its creation? Like Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, which provided a new perspective on how evolution works, Life on the Edge alters our understanding of our world's fundamental dynamics. Bringing together first-hand experience at the cutting edge of science with unparalleled gifts of explanation, Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe Macfadden reveal that missing ingredient to be quantum mechanics; the phenomena that lie at the heart of this most mysterious of sciences. Drawing on recent ground-breaking experiments around the world, each chapter in Life on the Edge engages by illustrating one of life's puzzles: How do migrating birds know where to go? How do we really smell the scent of a rose? How do our genes copy themselves with such precision? Life on the Edge accessibly reveals how quantum mechanics can answer these probing questions of the universe. Guiding the reader through the rapidly unfolding discoveries of the last few years, Al-Khalili and McFadden communicate the excitement of the explosive new field of quantum biology and its potentially revolutionary applications, while offering insights into the biggest puzzle of all: what is life? As they brilliantly demonstrate in these groundbreaking pages, life exists on the quantum edge.
E-Book Content
Life on the Edge The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili CROWN PUBLISHERS New York © 2014 Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. www.crownpublishing.com CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain as Life on the Edge by Bantam Press, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., in 2014. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request. ISBN 9780307986818 eBook ISBN 9780307986832 Illustrations by HL Studios Cover design by Na Kim v3.1 For Penny and Ollie Julie, David and Kate Contents About the Authors i Acknowledgments ii 1 Introduction A hidden spooky reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Quantum biology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Why should we be excited about quantum biology? . . . . . . . . 1 6 14 19 2 What is life? The “life force” . . . . . . . . Triumph of the machines . . . A molecular billiard table . . Life as chaos? . . . . . . . . . Peering deeper into life . . . . Genes . . . . . . . . . . . . . Life’s curious grin . . . . . . . The quantum revolution . . . Schrödinger’s wave function . The early quantum biologists Order all the way down . . . The estrangement . . . . . . 24 28 30 32 33 35 37 40 42 47 50 53 56 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .