It's all in the vibe

There is usually something in New Scientist that catches my eye. One of the articles in this week's edition  (1 Oct. 2011) was an article by Michael Brooks entitled 'The weirdness inside us'. In it Brooks explores research that postulates that quantum uncertainly operates within biological systems as well as in quantum mechanics. Jennifer Brookes at Harvard University studies smell. The established wisdom is that a chemical's scent is determined by its molecular shape. The problem with this is that we have around 400 differently shaped smell receptors but can recognise around 100,000 different smells. Some chemicals have the same shape but smell different, while others smell the same but have different shapes. Morphology cannot therefore be the answer, or the whole answer, to our sense of smell. Around 70 years ago a British chemist, Michael Dyson, proposed that 'just as the brain constructs colours from different vibrational frequencies of light radiation, it interprets the characteristic frequencies at which certain molecules vibrate as a catalogue of smells' (34). Now to me, as a non-scientitst, this sounds remarkably like the theory of homeopathy. One of the key criticisms of homeopathy seems to be not that it doesn't work, as in some circumstances it evidently does, but that the mechanism by which it might work is not within the remit of conventional science. Never mind that the mechanisms by which many of our conventional pharmacopeia works are not well understood. In 1996 Luca Turin, a biophysicist at UCL, came up with the notion of electron tunnelling as a mechanism that could make vibrational sensing work. The fuzziness of quantum mechanics determines that an electron has a spread of possible energies and that there is a probability that it will burrow through the energy barrier that would normally hold it within the atom. Turin proposed that when 'an odorous molecule lodges in the pocket of a receptor, an electron can burrow right through that molecule from one side to the other, unleashing a cascade of signals on the other side that the brain interprets as a smell. That can only happen if there is an exact match between the electron's quantised energy level and the odorant's natural vibrational frequency' (36). The article goes on to describe more recent experiments that would seem to support the notion of vibrational sensing. We seem to be moving away from an understanding of matter as made up of objects (atoms) to a view of matter as made up of energy and vibration. This holds true from the nano to cosmic level. It is the bits in between that have proved hardest to understand, but we seem to be getting there.