Physics is divided into “classical” and “quantum” physics only for historical reasons. Before the discovery of particles and before the rise of quantum theory, we had no way of knowing that the true nature of reality is not the same as the one we experience directly. And yet even now, people continue to cling to the fossilised, outdated belief that there is a separate “classical” world and a separate “quantum” world. There is not.
Everything in the universe is fundamentally the same. Everything is made of the same underlying stuff: particles. There is no god, no supernatural realm, and no such thing as “classical physics” as an independent layer of reality. There is only physics—and even that is merely a human way of describing things, because nature itself does not care how we categorise it.
We have the whole matter backwards, simply because we have grown accustomed to thinking this way. The long neglect of quantum biology is a perfect example. Even today, people still repeat the claim that biology cannot be quantum, because the environment in which biological processes occur is “warm and wet.” But this is nonsense. “Warm” and “wet” are themselves quantum-level phenomena. Heat is nothing other than the faster motion of particles, and the fact that we experience it as heat—and the very mechanism by which we experience it—is also part of the same underlying quantum reality.
In that sense, contemporary physics is rather like this: imagine a computer game made entirely of pixels. Now imagine that the game’s main character concludes that the background around it is probably made of pixels, but that it itself is not, because it is somehow special. The main character imagines that the movement of its arm is not produced by an algorithm manipulating pixels, but by some mystical, magically infused process belonging to its supposedly non-pixel body. That is how absurd our current habits of thought can be.
It is time to come back down to earth. The origin of life is another good example. To this day, people try to explain it by searching for proteins and various organic substances, even though life must also have arisen from a particular combination of particles. The first living system should not be thought of primarily as a protein or a molecule, but as a quantum structure—something like a nanorobot formed by nature itself. What we now call proteins may be parts of such a structure, or later manifestations of it.
A particular arrangement of particles came together, began to move, and became capable of using energy, taking in energy from its environment, and sustaining motion. Later, it may have developed the ability to change direction, and from there perhaps began to evolve structures that could store the blueprint for making itself again, and so on. If we ever build a truly functional quantum computer, perhaps we will be able to model these processes, decode them, and discover the precise quantum combination—the micro-environment and energy conditions—under which a structure like the one we call life can emerge. The earliest such particle combinations may have been the ancestors of the macro-scale quantum combinations we now call living beings. These processes may have unfolded unimaginably slowly, over millions of years.
Everything in this universe, in this world, is made of the same thing: the same nature, the same particles. We are the dance of quarks and gluons, and their energy is our mass. Classical physics is only a framework. It is a magnificent one, but there is a boundary beyond which it can no longer describe reality adequately—a boundary at which the true nature of nature begins to reveal itself.
Close your eyes. The absence of light, the blocking of photons from your retina, the sensation you experience even now—that too is a quantum phenomenon. Open them again: photons strike your retina, their energy is transferred to the particles there, that transfer is registered, and structures we call cells—built from immense assemblies of electrons, protons, neutrons, and the atoms made from them—carry those signals onward. Those signals are energy. Everything is energy. In the span of a blink, there are trillions of reactions, trillions of vibrations, trillions of spins. That is what you are, and that is what I am.
Biology, as a framework, sees only the higher levels of this process—the large-scale structures, such as proteins. But those, too, are only groups of particles. They are not reality itself.
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