All that we think is obvious in the physical world is, in reality, merely the physical traits that we can see, and which we then measure against the standards we are familiar with. For instance, our ‘common sense’ would appear to tell us that a big system (such as a forest ecosystem) could only be made up of subsystems (the trees, herbage, animals, water etc) that create a set of rules that linearly correlate with the overall workings of the big system (the forest). But what if we break down the subsystems further. For instance, let’s take a leaf from a tree and photosynthesis. Photosynthesis, as we should have learnt by middle school (if the school is doing its job), is the process by which a plant uses carbon dioxide, water, and the sun in combination to produce energy in the form of glucose, with the aid of a machinery known as chlorophyll.

All of these are explained using biological and chemical logic that do not, for instance, explain why the energy production of the leaf must work in such combination to produce the chemical kinetics that would then lead to the intricate production of the different energy compounds needed to power the life of the tree. Rather, what we get is the expected: every base component (water + carbon dioxide + sunlight (with the aid of chlorophyll) = ATP and NADPH (the energy molecules).

Admittedly, I am taking shortcuts around the steps needed to get to the final product, but even if you were to lay out all the steps, there is still a missing answer to the question of how the photons and neutrinos from the sun ‘cooperate’ with an even more complex range of particles found in carbon dioxide and water through the absorption of sunlight through the chloroplasts where the chlorophyll are located? This is even after we take into account the breaking down of those complex entities into subatomic particles found in hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. For some scientists, the answers lie in the quantum systems within each of these component subsystems, one represented by quantum biology.

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