Within the foothills to the south of Rome sits Italy’s premier nuclear physics lab, the Nationwide Laboratory of Frascati. It has all of the tools you’d anticipate at a cutting-edge science facility, with enormous magnets, highly effective particle accelerators and uncovered electrical cables spilling out all over the place. Lots of the researchers right here try to unpick the secrets and techniques of the usual mannequin, our greatest idea of how actuality works at its most basic degree. After which there’s the room the place Cătălina Curceanu is monitoring a small field of lentils.

Granted, it isn’t precisely regular behaviour for a physicist, however Curceanu hopes the equipment and strategies of nuclear physics can clear up the century-old thriller of why lentils – and different organisms too – always emit an especially weak dribble of photons, or particles of sunshine. Some reckon these “biophotons” are of no consequence. Others insist they’re a delicate type of lentil communication. Curceanu leans in direction of the latter camp – and she or he has a hunch that the pulses between the pulses may even comprise secret quantum alerts. “These are solely the primary steps, however it seems to be extraordinarily fascinating,” she says.

There are already hints that residing issues make use of quantum phenomena, with inconclusive proof that they function in photosynthesis and the way in which birds navigate, amongst different issues. However lentils, not recognized for his or her complicated behaviour, can be essentially the most startling instance but of quantum biology, says Michal Cifra on the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. “It could be wonderful,” says Cifra. “If it’s true.” Since so many organisms emit biophotons, such a discovery may point out that quantum results are ubiquitous…