Quantum Mechanics When You Close Your Eyes

Here’s a fun thing that has been zipping around the internets this week: a collection of “back of the envelope problems” put together by Edward Purcell. Hours of fun reading if you’re the kind of person who likes to spend their leisure time doing word problems (and I mean that in the best possible way).

One of Purcell’s problems is labeled “Electromagnetic energy in your eyeball,” and it concludes with a provocative (and true) observation. The problem asks the reader to calculate the total energy in all the photons that are inside your eyes at any one moment. Roughly speaking — which is the point, since we’re doing back-of-the-envelope problems — these photons come from one of two sources: the visible light from the outside world that enters your pupil, and the infrared light that is emitted as blackbody radiation from your eye itself, since you are an object at body temperature. Purcell suggests that you compare the amount of energy from each source.

And the answer is: there is much more electromagnetic energy in your eye at any one moment from the infrared radiation you’re emitting yourself, than the pittance of visible light you get from the outside world. Between 100,000 and a million times as much. Which raises a question we may never have thought to ask: why does it get dark when we close our eyes? The amount of electromagnetic radiation hitting our retinas hardly changes!

Purcell’s last sentence gives the answer: “Only quantum mechanics can explain why that makes it dark!”

We see light when photons of an appropriate wavelength reach the photoreceptor cells in the retinas of our eyes. The energy from the photon is converted into chemical energy via phototransduction, which sets an electrochemical signal to the visual cortex. (Presumably unnecessary disclaimer: everything I know about vision I learned from Wikipedia.) In particular, the photons are absorbed by a chemical called retinal, which isomerizes from the 11-cis state to the all-trans state. (That last bit was a blatant cut and paste.)

Here’s the part I do understand: isomerization is a matter of nudging a chemical from one structural form to another, without actually changing the chemical formula. Molecules have energy levels, just like electrons in atoms, and in order to effect the change in the retinal via photoexcitation, a photon has to have enough energy to cause a transition between the isomers. That’s a matter of quantum mechanics, full stop. Molecules can’t take on just any old energy; the allowed energies are quantized. As a result, it doesn’t matter that the infrared light inside your eyeball has much more energy than the visible light from the outside world; the energy comes in the form of individual photons, none of which has enough energy to get the reaction going. It’s very analogous to the photoelectric effect in metals, for which Einstein won his Nobel prize.

We often say that quantum mechanics applies to the world of the very small, and involves mind-bending alterations of our everyday reality. Which is true as far as it goes, but the more simple truth is that quantum mechanics applies to absolutely everything. It underlies how the everyday world works, from the stability of matter to the darkness when you close your eyes.

Quantum Mechanics When You Close Your Eyes | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine.