Curceanu hopes the apparatus and methods of nuclear physics can solve the century-old mystery of why lentils – and other organisms too – constantly emit an extremely weak dribble of photons, or particles of light. Some reckon these “biophotons” are of no consequence. Others insist they are a subtle form of lentil communication. Curceanu leans towards the latter camp – and she has a hunch that the pulses between the pulses might even contain secret quantum signals. “These are only the first steps, but it looks extremely interesting,” she says.
There are already hints that living things make use of quantum phenomena, with inconclusive evidence that they feature in photosynthesis and the way birds navigate, among other things. But lentils, not known for their complex behaviour, would be the most startling example yet of quantum biology, says Michal Cifra at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. “It would be amazing,” says Cifra. “If it’s true.” Since so many organisms emit biophotons, such a discovery might indicate that quantum effects are ubiquitous in nature.
Biophotons
Biophotons have had scientists stumped for precisely a century. In 1923, biologist Alexander Gurwitsch was studying how plant cells divide by placing onion roots near each other. The closer the roots were, the more cell division occurred, suggesting there was some signal alerting the roots to their neighbour’s presence.
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To tease out how the onion roots were signalling, Gurwitsch repeated the experiment with all manner of physical barriers between the roots. Wood, metal, glass and even gelatine dampened cell division to the same level seen in single onion roots. But, to Gurwitsch’s surprise, a quartz divider had no effect. Compared to glass, quartz allows far more ultraviolet rays to pass through. Some kind of weak emission of UV radiation, he concluded, must be responsible.
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Living organisms have long been known to communicate using light. Jellyfish, mushrooms and fireflies, to name just a few, glow or emit bright flashes to ward off enemies or attract a mate. But these obvious signals, known as bioluminescence, are different to the effect Gurwitsch had unearthed. Biophotons are “a very low-intensity light, not visible to the naked eye”, says Curceanu’s collaborator Maurizio Benfatto. In fact, biophotons were so weak that it took until 1954 to develop equipment sensitive enough to decisively confirm Gurwitsch’s idea.
Since then, dozens of research groups have reported cases of biophoton emission having a useful function in plants and even animals. Like onion roots, yeast cells are known to influence the growth rate of their neighbours. And in 2022, Zsolt PÓnya and Katalin Somfalvi-TÓth at the University of Kaposvár in Hungary observed biophotons being emitted by sunflowers when they were put under stress, which the researchers hoped to use to precisely monitor these crops. Elsewhere, a review carried out by Roeland Van Wijk and Eduard Van Wijk, now at the research company MELUNA in the Netherlands, suggested that biophotons may play a role in various human health conditions, from ageing to acne.
There is a simple explanation for how biophotons are created, too. During normal metabolism, chemical reactions in cells end up converting biomolecules to what researchers called an excited state, where electrons are elevated to higher energy levels. Those electrons then naturally drop to their ground state and emit a photon in the process. Because germinating seeds, like lentils, burn energy quickly to grow, they emit more biophotons.
Today, no one doubts that biophotons exist. Rather, the dispute is over whether lentils and other organisms have harnessed biophotons in a useful way.
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We know that plants communicate using chemicals and sometimes even emit ultrasonic squeaks when stressed. This allows them to control their growth, warn each other about invading insects and attract pollinators. We also know they have ways of detecting and responding to photons in the form of regular sunlight. “Biological systems can detect photons and have feedback loops based on that,”
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Curceanu and Benfatto are hoping that the application of serious physics equipment to this problem could finally let us eavesdrop on the legume’s secrets. They typically use supersensitive detectors to probe the foundations of reality. Now, they are applying these to a box of 75 lentil seeds – they need that many because if they used any fewer, the biophoton signals would be too weak.
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Years ago, Benfatto came across a paper on biophotons and noticed there appeared to be patterns in the way they were produced. The intensity would swell, then fall away, almost like music. This gave him the idea of applying a method from physics called diffusion entropy analysis to investigate these patterns. The method provides a means of characterising the mathematical structures that underlie complex patterns. Imagine comparing a simple drumbeat with the melody of a pop song, for example – the method Benfatto wanted to apply could quantify the complexity embodied in each.
To apply this to the lentils, Benfatto, Curceanu and their colleagues put their seeds in a black box that shielded them from interference. Outside the box, they mounted an instrument capable of detecting single biophotons. They also had rotating filters that allowed them to detect photons with different wavelengths. All that remained was to set the lentils growing. “We add water and then we wait,” says Benfatto.
In 2021, they unveiled their initial findings. It turned out that the biophotons’ signals changed significantly during the lentils’ germination. During the first phase, the photons were emitted in a pattern that repeatedly reset, like a piece of music changing tempo. Then, during the second phase, the emissions took the form of another kind of complex pattern called fractional Brownian motion.
Are these germinating lentils communicating in quantum code?
Catalina Curceanu
The fact that the lentils’ biophoton emissions aren’t random is an indication that they could be communicating, says Benfatto. And that’s not all. Tantalisingly, the complexity in the second phase of the emissions is mathematically related to the equations of quantum mechanics. For this reason, Benfatto says his team’s work hints that signals displaying quantum coherence could have a role in directing lentil germination.
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Part of the problem with designing experiments like these is that we don’t really know what quantum mechanical effects in living organisms look like. Any quantum effects discovered in lentils and other organisms would be “very different to textbook quantum mechanics”, says Scholes.
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so far, the evidence for quantum lentils is sketchy. Still, he is pushing ahead with a new experimental design that makes the signal-to-noise ratio 100 times better. If you want to earwig on the clandestine whispers of these seeds, it might just help to get rid of their noisy neighbours, which is why he will study one germinating lentil at a time.
