The A - Z of Sports Vision - Quantum Biology

“Q” should really be for the Quiet Eye, but as I've already talked about that, it’s an opportunity to talk about a sport that’s rarely mentioned in terms of sports vision – pigeon racing. The term quantum biology was first coined by Edwin Schrödinger (of Schrödinger’s cat fame) in 1944. It’s always seemed miraculous that birds are able to navigate so accurately over such long distances. It’s been assumed that they do this by using the earth’s magnetic field, but it’s only recently that our understanding of quantum physics has enabled us to speculate on how they actually do it. As soon as one enters the world of quantum physics, things start to get seriously weird pretty quickly. For instance, in quantum superposition, particles can have different states such as a particle or a wave, until you observe them. To take the idea to an absurd level, Schrödinger suggested that a cat in a sealed box could be both alive and dead until the box was opened. There is also the phenomenon of “entanglement” in which unconnected particles influence each other, so that measuring one affects the measurements of the other. It’s this process of entanglement that is thought to take place within the bird’s retina that enables it to navigate. The idea is that a photon entering the bird’s eye releases a pair of molecules, each with an unpaired electron. Each of these electrons has an angular velocity, or spin, that can be altered by a magnetic field. Under quantum entanglement, the spin of one electron will affect the spin of the other, no matter how far apart they are. The birds might even have an image of the magnetic field that overlaps the visual image. So far, the only suggested use of quantum biology in humans is that it may explain how we are able to distinguish different smells. But it’s early days; who knows what we may find out in the future? David Donner