Plants are possibly the most fundamental life form on Earth, making food and oxygen for ecosystems around the whole planet.
And yet many parts of their lives remain mysterious.
Photosynthesis — the process plants use to turn light into energy — is especially puzzling. Scientists have studied for years about how this process can capture 95% of energy from sunlight in just one million-billionth of a second.
Compare that 95% amount to our best solar panels, which work much differently than photosynthesis. They don't even come close to the efficiency of plants. Solar panels can change only 40% of sunlight into energy.
A research paper published in the scientific magazine Nature in 2007 says that photosynthesis might work only because of a bizarre effect of quantum physics.
Quantum physics controls the universe on very small scales — including at the size of molecules inside chloroplasts which is where photosynthesis happens. At that small size, things don't act the same way that large pieces of matter, that we see every day, act.
For example, the position of particles (link-1, link-2) in quantum physics isn't described by a certain location, but by a probability that the particle is at many locations at the same time.
When you add these probabilities together, you end up with the strange principle of superposition — particles existing in several places at once.
Photosynthesis takes the enormous number of photons in sunlight and puts them to use with amazing speed and efficiency. Almost no energy is wasted in the process. So what the photons may actually be doing is going through all the paths in the leaf simultaneously. That includes the most efficient path, which will deliver the maximum amount of energy in the shortest time.
This means plant chloroplasts somehow "know" how to pick the best path for a photon to capture its energy.
How plants do this remains unknown, but investigating that mind-blowing mystery stands to lead to the next breakthrough in solar power.