Ask What's in the Water

Migratory songbirds cross oceans guided by something happening inside their retinas. A protein called cryptochrome-4a absorbs blue light, knocking an electron loose and creating a pair of radicals — unpaired electrons sitting about 18 angstroms apart. These electrons are somehow sensitive to Earth’s magnetic field, a signal roughly ten million times weaker than thermal energy at body temperature. In 2024, Denton, Smith, Xu et al. showed in Nature Communications that the quantum Zeno effect is what keeps this working: asymmetric recombination reactions repeatedly “measure” the electron spins before decoherence can wipe out the signal [1]. A separate JACS paper by Jiate Luo, Joseph Subotnik, and Sharon Hammes-Schiffer at Princeton found that the protein physically rearranges to stabilize these radical pairs for microseconds [2]. And in 2025, Peter Maurer’s lab at UChicago turned fluorescent proteins into working biological qubits — Physics World put it in their top-10 breakthroughs of the year [3].

The impressive part isn’t the quantum mechanics. It’s that the protein environment both creates and threatens the entire mechanism. The quantum Zeno effect doesn’t repair anything. It changes the conditions so the problem doesn’t arise.

A 1987 documentary called “Slow Fires” shows the deputy librarian of Congress, William Welsh, holding up a book and letting the pages crumble off the binding like ash. Wood-pulp paper — basically everything printed after the 1850s — contains residual acid. That acid hydrolyzes cellulose chains, which produces more acid, which eats more cellulose [4]. Pre-1850 rag paper, made from cotton and linen, can last centuries. Wood-pulp paper starts turning to dust in 30 to 100 years. A 1989 statement to the House of Representatives estimated 80 million brittle books in North American libraries [5]. The Library of Congress has deacidified about 5.5 million books by impregnating them with magnesium oxide, changing the paper’s chemistry so it stops destroying itself [6]. That’s 5.5 million out of more than 181 million items in the collection [7]. The math on digitizing the rest doesn’t work out.

Nobody is repairing the paper. They’re neutralizing the acid so it stops falling apart.

Dip a wire frame into soapy water and the film pulls itself into the smallest possible surface. Surface tension does the work. But in higher dimensions — nine, ten, eleven — these minimal surfaces develop singularities, points where the surface stops being smooth. For about 40 years, mathematicians suspected some singularities were permanent features. In 2023 and 2025, Otis Chodosh, Christos Mantoulidis, Felix Schulze, and Zhihan Wang proved otherwise [8]. In dimensions up to 11, they showed that an infinitesimally small perturbation to the boundary makes every singularity disappear — a property called “generic regularity.” The proof builds on Federer’s classical dimension bounds and works by contradiction: assume a singularity survives the wiggle, stack the resulting surfaces, and the math breaks. Surface tension creates the minimal surface and also creates the singularities. You don’t fix the surface. You nudge the boundary and the surface fixes itself.

A quantum biology paper, a documentary about crumbling books, a proof in geometric analysis — three unrelated things that land on the same idea. An invisible force generates function and failure in the same motion, and the intervention that actually works doesn’t reach into the system. It changes what surrounds the system.

I don’t think this is a universal law. But I keep noticing it, and it makes me suspicious of how we usually approach problems. We want to fix the broken part. Replace the degraded paper. Smooth out the singularity. Correct the decohering electron. The more I read, the more it seems like the smart move is to step back and ask what’s in the water.

References

[1] Denton, Smith, Xu et al., “Magnetosensitivity of tightly bound radical pairs in cryptochrome is enabled by the quantum Zeno effect,” Nature Communications 15, 10823 (2024) — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-55124-x

[2] Luo, Hungerland, Solov’yov, Subotnik, Hammes-Schiffer, “Protein and Solvent Reorganization Drives Radical Pair Stability in Avian Cryptochrome 4a,” JACS (2025) — https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.5c15726

[3] Feder et al., “A fluorescent-protein spin qubit,” Nature 645, 73-79 (2025) — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09417-w

[4] Library of Congress, “The Deterioration and Preservation of Paper” — https://www.loc.gov/preservation/care/deterioratebrochure.html

[5] U.S. House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, testimony on Brittle Books (1989)

[6] Library of Congress, Mass Deacidification — https://www.loc.gov/preservation/about/deacid/index.html

[7] Library of Congress, “The Library Turns 225!” (March 2025) — https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2025/03/the-library-turns-225

[8] Chodosh, Mantoulidis, Schulze (2023); Chodosh, Mantoulidis, Schulze, Wang (2025) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02253