Can we ever truly experience reality?
Why is there something rather than nothing?
When is a strawberry dead?
For some reason, neither Plato nor Nietzsche took time to consider the strawberry. Nietzsche’s madman ran into the town square declaring that God was dead, but made no mention of the strawberry – and what of the plum, peach and gooseberry?
It took Professor Cox to contemplate the strawberry.
In a rare moment when he was distracted from thinking about subatomic particles and Hawking radiation, Brian’s brain accidentally allowed a thought about strawberries on a level above muon and lepton.
Could it be that his jam was in a superposition?
Schrödinger’s Compote?
And if there is Schrödinger’s strawberry compote, does that also mean we should be investigating Planck’s raspberries and Heisenberg’s goji berries?
Should market gardeners be looking at their fruit at a quantum rather than molecular level?
We were discussing levitating frogs. Andre Geim is a rarity in the scientific world, being a winner of both the Nobel and Ignoble Prizes. His Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for discovering a method to isolate a single layer of graphite atoms and thus create graphene, the thinnest and strongest material in the world. His frog levitation took place a decade before. Geim levitated frogs to demonstrate diamagnetism. Biologist and maggot expert Matthew Cobb explained the experiment. He told us it wasn’t really about the frog, though don’t tell that to the frog, they are very egotistical, especially the Poison Dart frog, which does not take criticism well. The experiment was about quantum mechanical effects; Geim also used water and ‘dead strawberries’.
Brian’s Vulcan ears pricked up like those of a German Shepherd. He was perplexed. ‘What qualifies a strawberry as being dead?’
It is here that the potential melancholy of jelly and the funereal possibilities of the trifle began.
What pathologist has the correct qualifications to declare a strawberry dead?
Animals are much easier than fruit to pronounce dead. The clues seem simpler: no heartbeat, no breathing, no eating, no movement. Even that may not offer certainty though.
Rana sylvatica is a species of wood frog (two frog mentions already, this should keep the frogs on side) that has ‘extreme freeze tolerance’. Species with this attribute can survive when two-thirds of their body water is frozen. Rana sylvatica also stops breathing and has no heartbeat for days at a time.
Life is notoriously hard to define. Every time you think you’ve come to a neat definition, some philosopher or other will pipe up, ‘ah, but isn’t that also the property of fire?’ Then, when you redefine, they’ll say, ‘ah, but isn’t that the property of crystals?’ Eventually, rather than define life, you want to take one.
Death must be easier to define.
Questions of life and death, whether on the scale of amoeba, strawberries or physicists demonstrates the complexity of living things and the difficulty of defining what it is to be alive.
For the physicist, the question becomes ‘how do you write the wave function of strawberry?’
According to the work of the French, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Louis De Broglie, it will have a wave length.
The definition of a dead strawberry became slippery. In the simplest terms, Professor Nick Lane stated that if it’s not continually harnessing energy to maintain being alive, it’s dead. The ability to harness energy seems to offer one of the most rewarding views of defining what is alive.
Professor Nick Lane: We need an enormous amount of energy to live… if you put a plastic bag over your head you’ll be dead in a minute and a half.
Brian: No, but I put strawberries in bags all the time and carry them back from the supermarket.
Robin: Can I just say he doesn’t come back from the supermarket with strawberries, he has a man that works for him who comes back with the strawberries from the supermarket…
Series 8, Episode 1 (24 June 2013)
So how do you murder a strawberry?
Whether boiling or freezing it, you are preventing the seed from ever germinating, curtailing the potential of the strawberry and yet increasing its potential too. Who wants to be a live and unknown strawberry when you could be a celebrated dead one smeared on a scone in Torquay? For a strawberry, a frog or a human, that is the key to life over death: do you still have potential? This page is in memory of all the strawberries that have died for us. Your death was delicious.
Brian replies…
Strawberries are inaccurately named, counter-intuitive things. The strawberry is not a berry: the red fruit is part of the stem of the plant from which the flower organs grow. The things we call the seeds – the little pits on the fruit – are not seeds, they are the plant’s ovaries, and the seeds reside inside. So is a strawberry dead or alive?
In the original episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage where I first posed the strawberry death question, Professor Matthew Cobb, from the University of Manchester, answered, ‘As soon as you pick a strawberry, it’s dying. As it decays it increases its sugar content, and that is what makes it sweet, but essentially it is dying.’ This is correct for the berry as a whole, which is a part of the plant and will decay if it isn’t attached. The strawberry no longer has access to the supply of ordered energy from the Sun that a plant uses to maintain its structure through photosynthesis, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics does the rest.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is arguably the only law of nature that we currently possess that is actually a law, which is to say physicists believe that it is absolutely right. Quantum Theory and General Relativity may one day be refined or even replaced, but the Second Law of Thermodynamics will surely still stand. It states that, over time, an isolated system will become more disordered. In simple terms: Things Can Only Get Worse.
If a teacup falls to the ground, it smashes into pieces, and we never see the pieces spontaneously reassemble into a teacup, even though there is nothing in the laws that govern the motion of the constituent molecules that prevents it. The reason is that there are many more ways of arranging the molecules such that they form a pile of bits on the floor than the very specific arrangement that makes a teacup. A teacup is an unlikely arrangement of molecules, given that all arrangements are equally likely.
Living things certainly seem to run counter to this law. A strawberry is one of the most complex things we know of in the Universe, and it is at first sight hard to see how this can be squared with the Second Law. This has become known as Schrödinger’s Paradox. The resolution to the paradox is relatively straightforward. The strawberry is not an isolated system: when the strawberry is attached to a living plant, it is part of a system that includes the heat of the Sun and the coldness of space. The Sun is a source of high-energy photons cascading down onto the leaves. The plant absorbs these photons and uses their energy to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen through photosynthesis.