In The Beginning...

This is not a bad article, written by Martin Rees. But then again, I'm a bit disappointed at how sloppy it is in some areas. I'm fully aware that this was written for the general audience, and it appeared in a regular newspaper. But still, he could have made it a bit more accurate without changing the readability of the article.

For example, he wrote this about a possible extra dimension for gravity:

Some have speculated that other universes could exist in tandem with ours. Imagine ants crawling around on a large sheet of paper (their two-dimensional universe). They would be unaware of a similar sheet that is parallel to it. Likewise, there could be another entire universe (with three-dimensional space, like ours) less than a millimetre away from us, but we would be oblivious to it if that millimetre were measured in a fourth spatial dimension, while we are imprisoned in just three.

While the original prediction by Arkani-Hamed et al. predicted millimeter scale compaction, it has now become sub-sub-sub-millimeter scale after several tests have concluded that the Newtonian gravity has not shown any deviation up to sub-micron length scales (or even smaller). So to me, the paragraph above gives the wrong idea that such extra dimension are of the order of just under a millimeter scale. We know quite a bit more now. There is no longer any need to stick with "under a millimeter" when we know it should be under a micrometer, which would be more accurate.

The other part is more puzzling and I don't know why he wrote it.

That said, everything, however complicated - breaking waves, migrating birds and tropical forests - is made of atoms and obeys the equations of quantum physics. But the uncertainties of subatomic physics are irrelevant to biologists; even if those equations could be solved, they would not offer the enlightenment that scientists seek.

This, I don't understand. There are already numerous examples of QM effects in biological system. I've mentioned a lecture given by Seth Lloyd at the Perimeter Institute. And we now have many reports of QM effects in photosynthesis. Someone like Rees should be aware of such advancement. So why would he made a statement that gives the impression that quantum mechanics offers no "enlightenment" to biologists?

{scratching head}

Zz.