Biology Might Not Be Quantum, but Its Math Is Quantumlike
Revealing hidden patterns in nature is a recurring theme in the work of Xavi Bou, an artist from Barcelona.
揭示大自然中隐藏的图案是巴塞罗那艺术家哈维·布 (Xavi Bou) 作品中反复出现的主题。
T wo decades ago, scientists seemed on the verge of understanding biology in a new, quantum way.
二十年前，科学家们似乎即将以一种新的量子方式理解生物学。
Life unfolds over an incomprehensible span of scales, from our planet-enveloping biosphere at one end, to individual cell-building biomolecules at the other.
生命在一个难以理解的尺度上展开，从一端包围着地球的生物圈，到另一端的单个细胞构建生物分子。
Even at its most microscopic, though, biology doesn’t really reach down to the quantum realm, in which particles act like waves, become entangled with one another, and exist in superpositions of multiple states at once.
然而，即使在最微观的情况下，生物学也并没有真正深入到量子领域，在量子领域中，粒子像波一样起作用，相互纠缠，并同时存在于多种状态的叠加中。
But scientists in the field of quantum biology are searching for ways that organisms might be able to push quantumness into the space, time, and temperature domains relevant to life, to make use of its strange properties.
但量子生物学领域的科学家正在寻找生物体能够将量子性推入与生命相关的空间、时间和温度领域的方法，以利用其奇怪的特性。
In photosynthesis, for example, organisms use specialized pigments and proteins to harvest light with nearly perfect quantum efficiency; they convert almost every incoming photon into useful chemical energy.
例如，在光合作用中，生物体使用特殊的色素和蛋白质以近乎完美的量子效率来收集光；它们将几乎所有传入的光子转化为有用的化学能。
In 2007, new evidence suggested that life might accomplish this feat by taking advantage of a quantum effect called coherence.
2007 年，新证据表明生命可能通过利用称为相干性的量子效应来完成这一壮举。
The result buoyed the controversial idea that, despite being a warm, wet, and decidedly classical environment, a living cell could maintain — and even exploit — fragile quantum states.
这一结果支持了一个有争议的想法，即尽管是一个温暖、潮湿且绝对经典的环境，活细胞仍然可以维持——甚至利用——脆弱的量子态。
Gregory Scholes , a chemist at Princeton University, was initially enthusiastic about the result.
普林斯顿大学的化学家格雷戈里·斯科尔斯最初对这一结果很感兴趣。
He and colleagues followed up with experiments on photosynthesizing proteins and pigments and came away with similar conclusions.
他和同事们对光合作用蛋白质和色素进行了后续实验，并得出了类似的结论。
But today, Scholes is skeptical that quantum effects play a role in life.
但如今，斯科尔斯对量子效应在生命中发挥的作用持怀疑态度。
In fact, he’s convinced that the way forward for quantum biology might not be quantum at all.
事实上，他坚信量子生物学的前进方向可能根本不是量子的。
Rather than taking advantage of genuine quantum effects, Scholes proposes, life might be imitating them instead.
斯科尔斯提出，生命可能不是在利用真正的量子效应，而是在模仿它们。
In several papers published over the past three years, Scholes and colleagues have shown that complex networks of classical objects can conspire to produce phenomena that mathematically mimic quantum objects .
在过去三年发表的几篇论文中，斯科尔斯和同事表明，经典物体的复杂网络可以共同产生在数学上模仿量子物体的现象。
Gregory Scholes, a chemist at Princeton University, has changed his thinking about whether life exploits quantum states.
普林斯顿大学化学家格雷戈里·斯科尔斯（Gregory Scholes）改变了他对生命是否利用量子态的看法。
Don’t be fooled: The states that these networks produce are not truly quantum; they’re only “quantumlike.” They arise when many interacting, oscillating parts add up to a collective whole whose behavior obeys the same mathematics that makes predictions about the quantum world.
不要被愚弄：这些网络产生的状态并不是真正的量子状态；而是量子状态。它们只是“类量子”的。当许多相互作用、振荡的部分加起来形成一个集体整体时，它们就会出现，而这个集体的行为遵循与对量子世界进行预测相同的数学原理。
“Maybe quantum biology, at the biggest scales, means using 3 1/2 billion years of evolution to work out how to get the functionality that you could get from quantum systems,” Scholes said.
斯科尔斯说：“也许量子生物学，在最大的尺度上，意味着利用 3.5 亿年的进化来弄清楚如何获得可以从量子系统中获得的功能。”
Researchers in the foundations of quantum mechanics have been exploring how to classically re-create certain aspects of the quantum world for decades, said Markus Müller , a physicist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna.
维也纳量子光学和量子信息研究所的物理学家马库斯·穆勒 (Markus Müller) 表示，数十年来，量子力学基础研究人员一直在探索如何以经典方式重建量子世界的某些方面。
What Scholes has done, Müller said, is show how quantumlike behavior can emerge from relatively unremarkable complex networks — of the sort that abound in nature.
穆勒说，斯科尔斯所做的是展示了如何从相对不起眼的复杂网络（自然界中大量存在的那种）中出现类量子行为。
“Classical systems can mimic some of the key features of quantum information,” said Sabre Kais , a quantum chemist developing quantum computing algorithms for complex systems at North Carolina State University.
“经典系统可以模仿量子信息的一些关键特征，”北卡罗来纳州立大学为复杂系统开发量子计算算法的量子化学家 Saber Kais 说。
“This is an exciting new direction.”
“这是一个令人兴奋的新方向。”
The temptation to recast life’s mysteries as quantum in nature is about as old as quantum mechanics itself.
将生命的奥秘重塑为自然界中的量子的诱惑大约与量子力学本身一样古老。
In a 1929 lecture, the quantum pioneer Niels Bohr made the vague but enticing statement that quantum mechanics, which at the time was just starting to find its mathematical footing, “may perhaps be of decisive importance, particularly in the discussion of the position of living organisms in our picture of the world.”
在 1929 年的一次演讲中，量子先驱尼尔斯·玻尔 (Niels Bohr) 做出了含糊但诱人的陈述，当时刚刚开始找到其数学基础的量子力学“可能具有决定性的重要性，特别是在讨论生物体在我们的世界图景中的位置时。”
Niels Bohr was one of the earliest physicists to propose that quantum mechanics might be connected to biology.
尼尔斯·玻尔是最早提出量子力学可能与生物学相关的物理学家之一。
Bohr’s contemporary Pascual Jordan spent several decades writing on Quantenbiologie , or quantum biology, arguing that life has a unique ability to amplify the strange indeterminism of the quantum world to macroscopic scales, and claiming this as the basis of human thought and free will.
与玻尔同时代的帕斯夸尔·乔丹（Pascual Jordan）花了几十年时间撰写有关量子生物学的文章，认为生命具有将量子世界奇怪的非决定论放大到宏观尺度的独特能力，并声称这是人类思想和自由意志的基础。
J.B.S.
J.B.S.
Haldane, a geneticist and evolutionary biologist, echoed Jordan in a 1934 paper arguing that the ability to scale up quantum indeterminacy was what made life special.
遗传学家和进化生物学家霍尔丹在 1934 年的一篇论文中呼应乔丹的观点，认为扩大量子不确定性的能力使生命变得特别。
(Jordan, who joined the Nazi Party and its paramilitary forces in 1933, damaged the credibility of quantum biology by attempting to link it to Nazism.)
（乔丹于 1933 年加入纳粹党及其准军事部队，试图将量子生物学与纳粹主义联系起来，从而损害了量子生物学的可信度。）
These early proponents of quantum biology sought explanations for the puzzling properties of life at the classical scale in the counterintuitive laws of physics at the quantum scale.
这些量子生物学的早期支持者在量子尺度上违反直觉的物理定律中寻求对生命在经典尺度上令人费解的特性的解释。
A classical particle can be in only one place, in one way, at a time; a quantum particle is smeared out across all the places and ways it could potentially be, in a kind of wave of possibility.
经典粒子一次只能以一种方式出现在一个地方；量子粒子以一种可能性的波的形式被涂抹在它可能出现的所有地方和方式上。
This smear is described mathematically by a wave function which, like a classical wave, has peaks and troughs.
这种拖影在数学上通过波函数来描述，波函数与经典波一样，具有波峰和波谷。
Until a particle is observed, all of its possible configurations effectively exist at once.
在观察到粒子之前，其所有可能的构型实际上同时存在。
They’re stacked up in superposition, like overlapping waves of water or sound.
它们叠加在一起，就像重叠的水波或声音。
And like overlapping waves, stacked quantum states add up, cancel one another out, or otherwise transform each other.
就像重叠的波一样，堆叠的量子态会叠加、相互抵消或以其他方式相互转化。
When quantum states in superposition have tidy enough wave properties to affect each other this way, they’re called coherent.
当叠加的量子态具有足够整齐的波特性以这种方式相互影响时，它们被称为相干的。
Coherent quantum systems can also become entangled with each other, essentially merging into a single, unified entity with a shared wave function.
相干量子系统也可能相互纠缠，本质上合并成具有共享波函数的单一统一实体。
Quantum states are delicate things; they’re easily destroyed when jostled against the outside world.
量子态是很微妙的东西。当与外界碰撞时，它们很容易被摧毁。
Even a tiny amount of environmental noise, like the atomic jiggle of heat, can trigger decoherence, a collapse into classical behavior.
即使是极少量的环境噪音，例如热量的原子抖动，也可能引发退相干，从而导致经典行为的崩溃。
(Quantum computers aren’t supercooled just for fun.) And in the interior of a cell, decoherence should be basically instantaneous — quantumness shouldn’t survive long enough in such an environment to have any bearing on biology.
（量子计算机并不是为了好玩而过冷。）在细胞内部，退相干应该基本上是瞬时的——量子性不应该在这样的环境中存活足够长的时间，从而对生物学产生任何影响。
It’s true that, even in a cell, very, very small particles like hydrogen atoms can “quantum tunnel,” popping up beyond energetic barriers that would otherwise slow them down or prevent them from crossing.
确实，即使在细胞中，像氢原子这样非常非常小的粒子也可以“量子隧道”，突然出现在能量屏障之外，否则能量屏障会减慢它们的速度或阻止它们穿过。
And there’s evidence that tunneling in certain enzymes could explain their speedy reaction rates.
有证据表明，某些酶的隧道效应可以解释它们的快速反应速度。
But that’s not really what quantum biologists are after, Scholes said.
斯科尔斯说，但这并不是量子生物学家真正追求的目标。
There’s no long-lived coherence involved in this kind of tunneling.
这种隧道效应不存在长期的一致性。
The quantumness involved is simple, fleeting, and kind of unavoidable — even in a flask of dead chemicals, some tiny particles will tunnel through energetic barriers.
所涉及的量子性是简单的、转瞬即逝的，而且是不可避免的——即使在一瓶死化学物质中，一些微小的粒子也会穿过能量屏障。
The question is whether life can do what dead chemistry can’t: hold quantum states in coherence long enough to use coherence itself as a resource.
问题在于，生命是否能够做到化学物质无法做到的事情：使量子态保持足够长的相干性，从而将相干性本身作为一种资源。
Scientists first toyed with the idea that quantum coherence could explain the remarkable efficiency of photosynthesis as early as the 1930s.
早在 20 世纪 30 年代，科学家们就首次提出了量子相干性可以解释光合作用卓越效率的想法。
Photosynthetic organisms use arrays of pigments and proteins called light-harvesting complexes to soak up light.
光合生物利用称为光捕获复合物的色素和蛋白质阵列来吸收光。
When a photon strikes one of these complexes, its electromagnetic energy is absorbed and boosts an electron in the complex into an excited state.
当光子撞击这些复合物之一时，其电磁能被吸收并将复合物中的电子提升到激发态。
This quasiparticle — called an exciton — heads toward a reaction center, where it is transformed into chemical energy that can perform the key steps of photosynthesis.
这种准粒子（称为激子）前往反应中心，在那里转化为可以执行光合作用关键步骤的化学能。
The process is nearly 100% efficient: Almost every single photon absorbed ends up powering photosynthesis.
这个过程几乎 100% 有效：几乎每一个吸收的光子最终都会为光合作用提供动力。
Scientists thought that if excitons maintained quantum coherence across multiple molecules in the light-harvesting complex, they could simultaneously explore several routes to the reaction center, rather than hopping around haphazardly and potentially getting lost.
科学家们认为，如果激子在光捕获复合物中的多个分子之间保持量子相干性，它们就可以同时探索通往反应中心的几条路线，而不是随意跳跃并可能迷路。
In 2007, Graham Fleming of the University of California, Berkeley tested this idea using a light-harvesting complex of pigments and proteins from a bacterium.
2007 年，加州大学伯克利分校的格雷厄姆·弗莱明 (Graham Fleming) 使用细菌中的色素和蛋白质的光捕获复合物测试了这一想法。
He and his colleagues pumped the pigments and proteins with extremely fast pulses of laser light to generate excitons, then probed them with follow-up pulses.
他和他的同事用极快的激光脉冲泵浦色素和蛋白质以产生激子，然后用后续脉冲探测它们。
This revealed synchronized “beats” that, at the time, seemed like evidence that excitons were interfering with each other via quantum coherence.
这揭示了同步的“节拍”，在当时，这似乎是激子通过量子相干性相互干扰的证据。
Other researchers, including Scholes, performed similar experiments and found similar beats — even in experiments conducted at room temperature.
包括斯科尔斯在内的其他研究人员也进行了类似的实验，并发现了类似的节拍——即使是在室温下进行的实验。
But just as quantum biology started to build momentum, it hit a wall.
但正当量子生物学开始积聚动力时，它却碰壁了。
Upon closer examination, beats like the ones that Fleming’s team described turned out to reflect not quantum coherence, but a resonance between wiggling molecular bonds.
经过更仔细的检查，弗莱明团队描述的那种节拍结果反映的不是量子相干性，而是摆动分子键之间的共振。
The resonance was an interesting effect that scientists are still working out, but it wasn’t long-lived, long-range quantum coherence.
共振是一种有趣的效应，科学家们仍在研究中，但它并不是长期存在的、长程的量子相干性。
Maybe quantum biology, at the biggest scales, means using 3 1/2 billion years of evolution to work out how to get the functionality that you could get from quantum systems.
也许量子生物学，在最大的尺度上，意味着利用 3.5 亿年的进化来弄清楚如何获得可以从量子系统获得的功能。
Gregory Scholes, Princeton University
格雷戈里·斯科尔斯，普林斯顿大学
“People were disappointed,” said Richard Cogdell , a photobiologist at the University of Glasgow.
“人们很失望，”格拉斯哥大学光生物学家理查德·科格德尔说。
“It would be exciting if there really was something to this, and there was something special about biology that no one had realized before.”
“如果这真的有什么意义的话，那就太令人兴奋了，而且生物学中有一些以前没有人意识到的特别之处。”
Researchers have hypothesized that quantum effects are at play in a variety of biological phenomena — including the magnetic sense that helps birds navigate and, more speculatively, human consciousness — with varying degrees of empirical support.
研究人员假设量子效应在多种生物现象中发挥着作用，包括帮助鸟类导航的磁感，以及更推测性的人类意识，并得到了不同程度的经验支持。
But at this point, there’s still no definitive proof for any long-lived quantum coherence with a biological function.
但目前，仍然没有明确的证据证明量子相干性具有生物功能。
Scholes has grown skeptical that scaling up effects such as coherence and entanglement in life is possible at all.
斯科尔斯越来越怀疑是否有可能扩大生活中的连贯性和纠缠性等影响。
“It’s that scale-up that gets the wow factor.
“正是这种规模的扩大才让人惊叹。
And the real quantum world isn’t going to scale up like that,” he said.
真正的量子世界不会像那样扩大，”他说。
At a conference in December 2023, Scholes had a conversation about what needed to happen to advance the field.
在 2023 年 12 月的一次会议上，斯科尔斯讨论了需要采取哪些措施来推动该领域的发展。
He recalls returning to his hotel room and jotting down an idea: Maybe the “quantum” in quantum biology doesn’t come from quantum mechanics at all, but emerges out of wavelike ripples across huge, complex networks.
他回忆起回到酒店房间并记下一个想法：也许量子生物学中的“量子”根本不是来自量子力学，而是从巨大而复杂的网络中的波状涟漪中产生的。
“I’m now convinced that you could get transformative effects, but they would come from classical systems mimicking what you can do with quantum systems,” Scholes said.
斯科尔斯说：“我现在相信你可以获得变革性的效果，但它们将来自模仿量子系统的经典系统。”
“Does it matter if you can’t tell the difference?”
“如果你无法区分这有什么关系吗？”
Scholes wondered if the emergence of special synchronized states in complex networks, like flocks of birds or schools of fish, might produce quantumlike behavior.
斯科尔斯想知道复杂网络中出现的特殊同步状态（如鸟群或鱼群）是否可能产生类似量子的行为。
Strip away the physics from a quantum state, and the mathematical object you’re left with is a vector — an ordered list of numbers that acts like coordinates for a location in a mathematical space of possibilities.
将物理学从量子态中剥离出来，剩下的数学对象就是一个向量——一个有序的数字列表，其作用类似于数学可能性空间中某个位置的坐标。
Quantum states are represented in a particular kind of vector space called a Hilbert space .
量子态用一种称为希尔伯特空间的特殊向量空间来表示。
Vectors in Hilbert space follow specific rules.
希尔伯特空间中的向量遵循特定的规则。
One of those rules says that any two states can be added together, and the result will also be a valid vector that, once normalized, will yield a valid quantum state.
其中一条规则规定，任何两个状态都可以加在一起，结果也将是一个有效的向量，一旦标准化，就会产生一个有效的量子态。
This is, mathematically, what quantum superposition gets at.
从数学上讲，这就是量子叠加的意义。
States are coherent if they have neat phase relationships that allow them to interfere — adding up or canceling out, depending on how they line up.
如果状态具有允许它们干涉的整齐相位关系——相加或抵消，则它们是相干的，具体取决于它们如何排列。
The coordinates of a vector in Hilbert space include information that corresponds to this alignment of peaks and troughs, called a wave’s phase.
希尔伯特空间中矢量的坐标包含与波峰和波谷的对齐相对应的信息，称为波的相位。
Andrei Khrennikov, a mathematician at Linnaeus University in Sweden, noticed a connection between quantum interference and the classical world in the 1990s when he began borrowing mathematics from quantum mechanics to model probabilities.
瑞典林奈大学的数学家安德烈·赫连尼科夫 (Andrei Khrennikov) 在 20 世纪 90 年代开始借用量子力学中的数学来建模概率时，注意到了量子干涉与经典世界之间的联系。
His idea, essentially, was that probabilistic outcomes — in fields as different as neuroscience and economics — can interfere with themselves like quantum states in superposition.
他的想法本质上是，概率结果——在神经科学和经济学等不同领域——可以像叠加态的量子态一样相互干扰。
In 2024, Scholes found a way to design complex networks of oscillators such that they produced emergent states — stable patterns of synchronized behavior, like a crowd that claps in time — that could be mathematically described as vectors in a Hilbert space.
2024 年，斯科尔斯找到了一种设计复杂振荡器网络的方法，使它们产生紧急状态——稳定的同步行为模式，就像人群及时鼓掌——可以在数学上描述为希尔伯特空间中的向量。
Specifically, he showed that networks can be constructed to produce emergent states that mathematically mimic the simplest quantum unit: a qubit, which has two states (like 1 or 0) and can exist in a superposition of both.
具体来说，他表明可以构建网络来产生紧急状态，这些紧急状态在数学上模仿最简单的量子单位：量子位，它有两种状态（如 1 或 0），并且可以以两种状态叠加存在。
“This strictly arises from the mathematical structure of the graph,” said Ethan Dickey , a computer scientist at Purdue University.
普渡大学计算机科学家伊森·迪基 (Ethan Dickey) 表示：“这完全是由图的数学结构引起的。”
“If you build graphs in certain ways which are not that unreasonable, they happen to pop up with this very nice, very elegant mathematical object that simulates — or almost approaches — a quantum object.
“如果你以某种并非不合理的方式构建图表，它们就会突然出现这个非常漂亮、非常优雅的数学对象，它模拟——或者几乎接近——一个量子对象。
Very different physics can underlie similar mathematical forms.
非常不同的物理学可以构成相似的数学形式。
Both the parabolic arc of a flying baseball and the parabolic arc at the tip of a cactus spine can be described using quadratic equations, but the two are fashioned by different forces.
飞行棒球的抛物线弧和仙人掌刺尖端的抛物线弧都可以使用二次方程来描述，但两者是由不同的力形成的。
So a mathematical connection between the classical and quantum worlds shouldn’t be mistaken for a physical one.
因此，经典世界和量子世界之间的数学联系不应被误认为是物理联系。
There’s a complicated history of both serious research and fanciful speculation about quantum effects in life.
关于生命中量子效应的严肃研究和奇思妙想都有一段复杂的历史。
Ebrahim Karimi, a physicist at the University of Ottawa, thinks researchers should be careful about putting too much stock in this mathematical link.
渥太华大学物理学家易卜拉欣·卡里米 (Ebrahim Karimi) 认为，研究人员应该谨慎对待这一数学联系。
He praises Scholes’ new framework for its elegance and says it could be useful, but he thinks quantum vocabulary doesn’t belong anywhere near classical systems.
他赞扬了斯科尔斯的新框架的优雅，并表示它可能很有用，但他认为量子词汇不属于经典系统。
Interference isn’t anything mysterious or quantum, Karimi pointed out.
卡里米指出，干扰并不是什么神秘或量子的东西。
It’s simply a feature of how waves behave.
这只是波行为的一个特征。
There’s a complicated history of both serious research and fanciful speculation about quantum effects in life.
关于生命中量子效应的严肃研究和奇思妙想都有一段复杂的历史。
Researchers want to gain a better understanding of when and how classical systems can mimic quantum math.
研究人员希望更好地了解经典系统何时以及如何模拟量子数学。
That knowledge could be helpful for sorting out contentious claims about quantum effects in life — including in the brain.
这些知识可能有助于解决有关生命中（包括大脑）量子效应的有争议的主张。
Among researchers keen to connect life to the quantum realm, the brain has long been a focus of intense interest and plenty of heated debate.
在热衷于将生命与量子领域联系起来的研究人员中，大脑长期以来一直是人们强烈兴趣和激烈争论的焦点。
In 1989, for instance, Roger Penrose revived old ideas about quantum physics as the basis for free will; he proposed that consciousness arises from quantum effects in the brain , in networks of protein filaments called microtubules.
例如，1989 年，罗杰·彭罗斯 (Roger Penrose) 复兴了关于量子物理学作为自由意志基础的旧观念；他提出意识是由大脑中称为微管的蛋白质丝网络中的量子效应产生的。
Few neuroscientists take this view seriously.
很少有神经科学家认真对待这个观点。
Given that context, Wolf Singer , a neurophysiologist at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute of the Max Planck Society, was initially skeptical when Khrennikov invited him to a workshop on quantumlike modeling.
鉴于这种背景，当赫连尼科夫邀请他参加类量子建模研讨会时，马克斯·普朗克学会恩斯特斯特伦曼研究所的神经生理学家沃尔夫·辛格最初表示怀疑。
Singer and colleagues showed in 2025 that introducing oscillations into a particular kind of simple neural network makes them more efficient and robust .
Singer 及其同事在 2025 年证明，将振荡引入特定类型的简单神经网络可以使它们更加高效和鲁棒。
Singer said that using interference essentially gave the network a new dimension to work with: time.
辛格表示，使用干扰本质上为网络提供了一个新的工作维度：时间。
This was because the phase of an oscillation encodes information about how events are structured in time relative to each other.
这是因为振荡的相位编码了有关事件如何在时间上相对于彼此构建的信息。
After the workshop, Singer said he was “impressed by the fact that some real-world phenomena are maybe better described using the description techniques they use in quantum physics.”
研讨会结束后，辛格表示“令他印象深刻的是，使用量子物理学中使用的描述技术可能可以更好地描述一些现实世界的现象。”
Quantumlike states also provide a conceptual blueprint for intentionally engineering networks — which could be anything from electrical circuits to neurons to physical pendulums coupled by springs — that can take advantage of superposition and interference to compute.
类量子态还为有意设计的网络提供了概念蓝图——可以是从电路到神经元再到由弹簧耦合的物理摆的任何东西——可以利用叠加和干扰进行计算。
In follow-up work, Scholes and his colleagues showed that it’s possible to wire together quantumlike bits to produce bigger networks, which are also quantumlike states, and demonstrated how a network could be designed to mimic the quantum version of a “logic gate,” a circuit used to perform a simple computation.
在后续工作中，斯科尔斯和他的同事表明，可以将类量子位连接在一起以产生更大的网络，这些网络也是类量子态，并演示了如何设计一个网络来模仿“逻辑门”的量子版本，“逻辑门”是一种用于执行简单计算的电路。
Dickey and his doctoral co-supervisor, Kais, believe quantumlike states have “strong potential for practical applications” in quantum machine learning and in modeling complex systems.
迪基和他的博士生导师凯斯相信，类量子态在量子机器学习和复杂系统建模方面具有“巨大的实际应用潜力”。
But those applications face limitations: The complexity of the underlying network blows up when you start wiring quantumlike bits together.
但这些应用程序面临着局限性：当你开始将类量子位连接在一起时，底层网络的复杂性就会急剧增加。
To perfectly mimic quantum logic gates, “you need to have infinite resources, physical resources,” Scholes said.
为了完美地模仿量子逻辑门，“你需要拥有无限的资源，物理资源，”斯科尔斯说。
Dickey has built on Scholes’ work to pin down network properties that produce quantumlike states and is working to find computationally efficient ways to produce them.
迪基以斯科尔斯的工作为基础，确定了产生类量子态的网络属性，并正在努力寻找计算有效的方法来产生它们。
He also published work in 2026 showing how networks can be designed to produce more kinds of quantum states than Scholes’ original framework allowed.
他还在 2026 年发表了论文，展示了如何设计网络来产生比斯科尔斯原始框架允许的更多种类的量子态。
For his part, Scholes is interested in understanding the limits of quantumlike states in the classical world.
就斯科尔斯而言，他有兴趣了解经典世界中类量子态的极限。
He’s working to determine whether it’s possible for classical systems to meaningfully mimic entanglement.
他正在努力确定经典系统是否有可能有意义地模拟纠缠。
Even if biology is ultimately not as quantum as researchers once hoped, there may still be interesting — and potentially illuminating — parallels between the living world and the quantum realm.
即使生物学最终不像研究人员曾经希望的那样量子化，生活世界和量子领域之间仍然可能存在有趣且具有潜在启发性的相似之处。
Although quantum superpositions dissolve with increasing scale, aspects of the math that governs the smallest, simplest stuff of existence seem to resurface in the most sprawling, complex classical systems we know.
尽管量子叠加随着规模的扩大而消失，但控制最小、最简单的存在事物的数学方面似乎在我们所知的最庞大、最复杂的经典系统中重新出现。
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