AS if they don’t have enough on their hands tackling some of the biggest questions about our universe, some physicists are muscling in on biology’s greatest endeavour. Life, say the physicists, began with a quantum flutter.
The idea that quantum mechanics is key to explaining the origin of life was first raised as far back as 1944 in Erwin Schrödinger’s influential book What is life?.
More than 60 years later, this bold prediction has still to be confirmed. Its proponents have struggled to find a way round the fact that quantum effects lose all their handy weirdness in…
