Bird Navigation Based On Quantum Zeno Effect

KentuckyFC writes "How birds use the Earth's magnetic field to navigate has puzzled researchers for decades. In recent years, a growing body of evidence has pointed to the possibility that a weak magnetic field can influence the outcome of a certain type of chemical reaction involving the recombination of pairs of ions in bird retinas. The trouble is that the ion recombination is known to happen too quickly for the Earth's weak magnetic field to have any effect. Now it looks as if the quantum Zeno effect explains all, says one researcher (abstract). This is the watched-pot-never-boils effect in which the act of observing a quantum system maintains it for longer than expected. That's extraordinary news because it means a quantum sensor is determining the macroscopic behavior of living birds."

Comments

Re:Every chemical sensor is a "quantum sensor"

[jd]

You're totally correct there. However, you should remember that departments get funded by how often their papers get cited, so there is an incentive to make all papers fully buzzword-compliant rather than scientifically correct. In this particular case, it could be argued that the buzzword is appropriate because the effect being utilized is normally only seen at the microscopic level, not the macroscopic as here. However, precisely since the Zeno Effect is normally only seen at the microscopic level, the addition of the term "quantum" is superfluous and therefore likely used more to draw attention to the article than to say anything useful.

Specifically on the topic of mystifying science, science classes generally don't help much in this regard. They work from older models to newer ones, which in itself isn't necessarily bad (as it teaches how to understand things from first principles and how the ideas developed historically) but because older models introduced fudge factors or were based on incorrect assumptions, those who do not progress far enough in science classes are left with erronious beliefs and superstitions. Even those who do progress to a high level are at risk, because once something is learned, it is very hard to unlearn it.

The selection of models - and textbooks - is also important. Most textbooks are historically inaccurate (negating the value of the teaching the history of science and assisting in the mystifying and religifying of modern discoveries of historical fact) and many contain errors in the science (such as confusing the terminology, getting the right results for the wrong reasons, and so forth). The teaching of calculus is particularly bad - I've known a lot of bright people left totally confused by it due to the fact that the way it is usually taught misses a lot of mental steps in the process and fails to define terminology. That's a pity. Calculus is so simple that Archimedes could not only derive it from first principles but also discover the first principles as well in only a handful of notes. Combinatorial logic is generally taught as an advanced subject, but the foundations were discovered by cutting up triangles, making it a subject that could be taught at elementary school the same way Venn diagrams and basic set logic are. (It may be, by now, but I've a suspicion the reverse is true, that less science appears at an early age.)

Finally, the complexity and difficulty of problems is also exaggerated. Stonehenge's 250 tonne massive Sarson stones are local, it's the bluestone granite that was imported and those are much smaller. The Great Pyramid was built after a long history of developing the technology and the difficult parts were probably poured as a form of concrete. (This makes the proposed German concrete Pyramid - a giant cemetary for tens of thousands, which is intended to be three times taller than the Great Pyramid - a direct successor in terms of materials used as well as intended purpose.) The weather isn't horrendously complex, it's merely an unstable chaotic system. The illusion of complexity comes from the fact that it can never be measured accurately enough to model perfectly. Quantum mechanics is not stuffed full of paradoxes, it's merely stuffed full of probabilities. Particle/wave duality, the existence of fields, and other convenient tricks are merely taught to avoid having to explain the mechanics behind the science. In a way, it's worse than caveman logic, because they had the excuse of not having the information available about the underlying principles. Today, no such excuse exists.