Your Cells Might Be Running on Quantum Light: Milky Way News

EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster—Physicists usually need vacuum chambers, lasers and temperatures near absolute zero to coax matter into strange quantum behavior. A team in China now says the warm, wet, crowded inside of a living cell may be doing it on its own, inside the little organelles that keep you alive.

Mystics have talked about an inner light for centuries, and this study suggests something light-like really is mixing with matter in our cells, though in invisible infrared.

The claim comes from a preprint titled "A quantum state of mitochondria in the living cell," posted to bioRxiv in September by researchers from Fudan University and the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology. It has not yet been peer reviewed.

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You may remember learning in high school biology that mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell. They make ATP, the tiny energy packets your body spends on everything from blinking to thinking.

To peek inside them, the team shined infrared light at living cells and watched which frequencies got absorbed. Every chemical bond vibrates at its own pitch, a bit like a guitar string, so the readout works like sheet music for the molecules inside. Most of the notes were familiar. One, at 71 terahertz, matched nothing that should be there

That mystery note turned up in human cells, in mouse kidney, liver, heart and muscle, and in mitochondria pulled out of those samples. Then the scientists dried the cells out and ground them into powder, and the note disappeared. Whatever was making it needed the mitochondria to keep their shape.

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According to the paper, mitochondria are packed with fat molecules that vibrate and give off faint infrared light. The researchers propose that the mitochondrion acts like a tiny echo chamber, sized just right to bounce that light back and forth until the light and the vibrating molecules blend into one hybrid thing. Physicists call this kind of light-matter mashup a polariton. The team calls their version a "mito-polariton," and their math says it should produce a note right at 71 terahertz.

When the team tried to play the note back, hitting human cells with very faint infrared laser light at that frequency for 10 minutes, the cells made about 10 percent more ATP, the preprint reports. A laser tuned to a different frequency did nothing.

If the findings hold up, the engine inside nearly every cell in your body may run on a quantum trick, and the right shade of invisible light might give it a nudge. That would drag quantum biology out of the realm of exotic oddities and into the most basic machinery of life.

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The idea of a light inside humans is ancient and turns up across cultures.

The Chandogya Upanishad, one of Hinduism’s oldest philosophical texts, says the light that shines “above this heaven” is “the same light which is within man.” As proof, it points to the warmth you feel when you touch your own body. (Fun fact: body heat radiates mostly as infrared.)

In the 12th century, the Persian philosopher Suhrawardi built a whole “Philosophy of Illumination” on the idea that everything exists in degrees of light, and that the human self is “an incorporeal light.” A 17th-century Taoist meditation manual, The Secret of the Golden Flower, teaches practitioners to turn the light back inward.

The Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian text, includes the line “There is light within a man of light, and he lights up the whole world.” While those writers meant something spiritual, not infrared radiation, it shows some humans have long considered an internal light as a kind of secret ingredient to existence.

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However, the quantum state hasn't been seen directly. It's inferred by matching one small signal to a model. The energy boost was tested on a single type of lab-grown cell, not in animals or people. And no other lab has repeated any of it yet.

Still, for thousands of years, people have pressed a hand to their own warm skin and wondered whether there was light inside. If this study holds up, the answer might be yes, just in a light no one could ever see.

Except, perhaps, the mystics.