Quotes from Johnjoe McFadden

The Vikings could have been saved if they had borrowed survival strategies from the Inuit, but the only record we have of contact between the two peoples is the remark from a Viking settler that the Inuit bleed a lot when stabbed - an observation that hardly indicates a willingness to learn from their northern neighbors.

The important point is that the singular object that is the balloon strictly obeys the gas law because the orderly motion of its single continuous elastic surface arises from the disorderly motions of very large numbers of particles, generating, as Schrödinger put it, order from disorder.

The problem with using gunk as the starting material for generating organized life is that the random thermodynamic forces that were available in the primordial earth—the billiard-ball-like molecular motions that we discussed in chapter 2—tend to destroy order rather than create it.

Of course, any scenario involving quantum mechanics in the origin of life three billion years ago remains highly speculative. But, as we have discussed, even classical explanations of life's origin are beset with problems: it isn't easy to make life from scratch!

Quantum mechanics is normal. It is the world it describes that is weird.

it was known that genes could be faithfully transmitted with mutation rates (errors) of less than one in one billion. This extraordinary high degree of fidelity convinced Schrödinger that the laws of heredity could not be founded on the "order from disorder" classical laws. Instead, he proposed that genes were more like individual atoms or molecules in being subject to the nonclassical but strangely orderly rules of the science he helped to found, quantum mechanics.

Much of the skepticism Schrödinger's claim attracted at the time was rooted in the general belief that delicate quantum states couldn't possibly survive in the warm, wet and busy molecular environments inside living organisms

between the quantum and classical worlds, the quantum edge, where we, as you will have guessed from the title of this book, are claiming life also lies.

So, could the solution to the mystery of how birds find their way around the globe lead to a revolution in biology? The

Perhaps the oddest fact we know about the universe is that we know a great deal about it,

Life appears to have one foot in the classical world of everyday objects and the other planted in the strange and peculiar depths of the quantum world. Life, we will argue, lives on the quantum edge.

entanglement is a quantum step up from coherence whereby quantum particles lose their individuality, so that what happens to one affects them all, instantaneously.

Schrödinger's seventy-year-old insight that the kinds of living system that are likely to support quantum rules will involve small numbers of particles.

there is in fact no evidence that quantum mechanics is actually needed at all to account for consciousness—unlike other biological phenomena that we have considered in this book such as enzyme action or photosynthesis.

The finding clearly demonstrated that the earth had liquid warm oceans not long after its formation,*1 with mud volcanoes (figure 9.2) bubbling out of hydrothermal vents at the bottom of a shallow sea.