Question: Will your work affect the enviroment?

Nathan Langford answered on 27 Jun 2012:

I agree, this is certainly a great question.

Fortunately, in my work, we don’t generally end up generating too much in the way of toxic or chemical or biological waste products in what we do every day. And as Allan said, on the rare occasions that we do (usually only chemical – not toxic or biological), we make sure that we dispose of it properly. So my sort of work doesn’t tend to have too much of a direct impact on the environment.

The biggest way our work affects the environment is that it can sometimes use quite a lot of power, so this is something we have to be careful of and something that I think I’m going to have to think about more in the future.

However, while still only a future possibility, there is one way my work might be able to help the environment. By far the best machines we know of for creating clean, renewable energy are plants! They absorb sunlight and with water and a few other bits and pieces, can create all the energy they need to grow. The thing is: they seem to be too good at it. They seem to manage to collect all that light spread out across all of their leaves and shuffle the resulting energy very efficiently from where it was absorbed to where it was used – efficiently and fast. And we don’t know how they do it. For example, there’s a particular organism that lives at the very bottom of the ocean and only sees less than one single photon *per day*!! But it still manages to capture that light and use the energy to survive.

In the last few years, however, scientists have begun to suggest that the reason plants can do this so efficiently is because of quantum physics. Now this is very strange, because, as I’ve mentioned in other answers, quantum physics usually only works properly when things are either very small or very cold (we’re talking colder than space here – near absolute zero temperature – even freezing cold is nowhere near enough). But plants are neither small nor cold! So how do the effects of quantum physics and, specifically, entanglement manage to survive in a “hot and wet” biological environment? Well, until a few years ago, no one believed it could. But now people are starting to discover ways that these effects can survive in these “noisy” environments – and sometimes even work better than when there is no noise!

So far, however, all of these experiments are really hard to test and the systems are so complicated that they’re almost impossible to calculate, except using very simplistic models. If we could build a quantum computer or quantum simulator, however, we could simulate these systems directly and try and discover how nature does it so well. And if we could work that out, maybe we could then work out how to make much more efficient solar power!

As I said, this is a very, very ambitious goal and is a long way off and no one really knows yet whether it will actually be possible in the end, but the potential rewards are huge – and that makes the search worthwhile pursuing. And just that much more fun, too!