At the Edge of Uncertainty by Michael Brooks

Author:Michael Brooks [BROOKS, MICHAEL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781468311594
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2015-02-09T16:00:00+00:00

If you get the chance, read Sara Maitland’s beautiful and startling story Moss Witch. It depicts an encounter between a botanist, whose beard is ‘the colour of winterkilled bracken’ and a strange, magical creature who has the mosses of the wood at her command.

The Moss Witch utters an achingly beautiful line during her conversation with the botanist. She is native to the wood where they meet, and tells the botanist of her sadness that evolution has left her alone and unable to create company for herself, even by cloning. ‘That’s one of the problems of evolution – losses and gains, losses and gains,’ she says. In the end, Maitland tells us, mosses – and moss witches – learned to accept their lowly place in the natural world. ‘Moss witches, like mosses, do not compete; they retreat.’

Evolution’s losses and gains led mosses to retreat in the face of something we take for granted now: the leaf. It is the source of life to us, because it offers a form of stored energy that we can process; without the leaf, it’s hard to see how we and the other animals would have arisen in the evolutionary heritage of the earth.

The leaf, it turns out, is a remarkable piece of technology. Light lands on a leaf in quantum energy packets called photons. Every second it spends in bright sunlight brings a leaf thousands of trillions of photons. And almost every one of the red ones is captured and its energy processed.

Let’s trace the path of that energy through the plant. The first stop is the antenna, an assembly of hundreds of thousands of chlorophyll molecules. Hit by the photon, an electron within the chlorophyll will become ‘excited’ and use the extra energy to bounce through the antenna to a bridging area. This is composed of a complicated arrangement of chlorophyll molecules: you can imagine it as an intertwined maze of rope bridges that, if you can find the path through, lead to the all-important ‘reaction centre’.

Once at the reaction centre, the electron creates a permanently separated charge that is, essentially, energy that can be stored. It’s the same thing that makes a fully charged battery such a useful source of power. At that point, the energy is safe and properly stored, ready for use by the plant. There’s just one catch: the reaction centre is a nearly impossible place to reach.

Getting through the bridging area is a nightmare, and it has to be done quickly. The maze of wobbly rope bridges will absorb all the photon’s energy if it takes too long to find the reaction centre; a packet of energy has about 1 nanosecond to get across the bridge. Some might chance upon the right path and make it through in time; most, though, won’t. This is where the quantum tricks – and Gregory Scholes’s research team – come in.

Scholes is no scruffy botanist; there’s no beard the colour of winter-killed bracken on his face. Look at his research group website, and you’ll discover that Scholes wears Prada shoes and a ‘porn-star shirt’.

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