Keels and quantum stability

 

Here's a yacht in a special boat lift at Ardrossan marina. The boat needs to be supported because of its keel. Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden use a boat keel as an analogy. They say that classical theories leave the processes inside a warm cell like a boat without a keel. It would get tipped over quickly and so the structures that give us life couldn't endure. They then say that the random statistical processes in fluids are like particles on both sides of a keel but that the keel needs to be deep enough to reach into the quantum world. There the processes in protein bond oscillations that can knock excitons back into coherence and thus allow improbable structures to endure. You'll need to read their full account in Quantum Biology.