Jim Al-Khalili and the Quantum Robin
We've known for some time that certain animals can navigate the Earth using it's magnetic fields, but the methods by which they do this have remained largely unknown. However, an emerging...
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I'm standing here on the roof of the Royal Institution. And I'm using something that we take for granted in the modern technological world, a compass, using GPS built into my smartphone. And I can use it to find the direction to magnetic north, which is that way, which means that south is that way. Which means Spain is over 1,000 kilometres in that direction. I'm interested because what we think we're very clever at doing, nature has figured out before us. Lots of migrating birds and marine animals have built-in compasses in their brains, in their eyes, at the ends of the beaks, so they can detect the direction they should travel. One bird in particular, however, does something much more clever. The European Robin uses quantum mechanics...
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I'm standing here on the roof of the Royal Institution. And I'm using something that we take for granted in the modern technological world, a compass, using GPS built into my smartphone. And I can use it to find the direction to magnetic north, which is that way, which means that south is that way. Which means Spain is over 1,000 kilometres in that direction. I'm interested because what we think we're very clever at doing, nature has figured out before us. Lots of migrating birds and marine animals have built-in compasses in their brains, in their eyes, at the ends of the beaks, so they can detect the direction they should travel. One bird in particular, however, does something much more clever. The European Robin uses quantum mechanics...
