Philip Kurian, a theoretical physicist and founding director of the Quantum Biology Laboratory (QBL) at Howard University in Washington, D.C., has used the laws of quantum mechanics, which Schrödinger postulated, and the QBL’s discovery of cytoskeletal filaments exhibiting quantum optical features, to set a drastically revised upper bound on the computational capacity of carbon-based life in the entire history of Earth. Published in Science Advances, Kurian’s latest work conjectures a relationship between this information-processing limit and that of all matter in the observable universe.

Today, physicists are still asking themselves whether quantum mechanics needs hypercomplex numbers. FAU researchers Ece Ipek Saruhan, Prof. Dr. Joachim von Zanthier and Dr. Marc Oliver Pleinert have been investigating this question in their research.