Bees and pollination of the cosmos
I witnessed the Big Bang, followed by what seemed to be the cosmos passing me by at great speed. Then a curious sight came up: a giant see-through bee moving along galaxies. This dream stuck with me and led me to research how improbable that creature would be, or if it were somehow a symbolic image of a possible system that exists in our world.
The bee as we know it on earth, is an insect that is commonly found in a colony and plays a major role in pollination. A known process is that the bee goes up to a flower to collect its pollen and some of it will stick to its body and by flying away, the bee will spread pollen to its surroundings. When the pollen is moved from the stigma of a flower to the stigma of an other flower, fertilisation can take place and a seed will be produced.
Bee movie (2007) opens with the following statement: “According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. It's wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway, because bees don't care what humans think is impossible.” neither do the guys who created this film.
Bees are not the only creatures that allow pollination but they are crucial to our existence. It is estimated that in the US, bees participate in up to 80% of all crop pollination. However, it has recently been discovered that pollination carried out by living creatures does not only occur on earth, but seems to take place in the ocean and goes by the name of zoobenthophilous pollination. Swarms of tiny invertebrates carry and transfer pollen carrying the same process as bees, allowing pollination. This seems to happen when there is an absence of water-flow.
On the topic of the ocean, Blue Planet II (2017) with David Attenborough makes a strong case for life making an appearance in the most improbable places. When it was thought that all living creatures needed daylight to survive, we can find all sorts of species living in complete darkness and under incredible amounts of pressure in the ocean. It is also interesting to see that they are usually rather small when we would perhaps expect that only massive creatures would survive the pressure in deep sea. Watching the episode “Caves” from Planet Earth (2006) also shows creatures thriving in places that are extremely hostile to life, such as fish by the name of Cave Mollies living in heavily acidic water and a low oxygen environment. Even more surprising are the snottites, “a microbial mat of single-celled extremophilic bacteria” found in the same cave which get their energy from volcanic sulfur. Despite creating sulfuric acid themselves, they are at the bottom of their food chain and support the lives of insects such as midges.
Screen capture of Snottites, from the documentary series Planet Earth (2006)
The aforementioned bacteria belongs to a category of living beings called Extremophiles. Extremophiles are organisms that survive in environments which would be lethal for most species. The Tardigrade, or Water Bear, is a micro-animal and falls into this category. It looks like this:
It would be cute if it weren’t for its anus-shaped mouth. Picture taken from the NASA website.
Tardigrade species are incredible in their tolerance to extreme environments. You can literally leave one in the vacuum of space, bring it back to earth and it is likely it will still be alive. They can survive temperatures from -200 C to 148.9 C and 6 times the pressure of the ocean. Their ability to survive extreme conditions comes from the fact that they are capable of dehydrating themselves in such a way that these lethal aspects of their environment do not affect them, once they are hydrated again they “come back to life”. It has been demonstrated that some places in our neighbouring planets and their moons seem more hospitable than areas where the tardigrade survives. For example Saturn’s moon Titan with its thick atmosphere seems far more hospitable than the vacuum of space where it can survive. However, they are not immortal and the longer they stay dehydrated, the less chance that they will come alive in contact with water. The maximum they can survive dehydrated seems to be 10 years as far as we know. Let’s say we have a meteorite carrying some form of H2O and within its crust tardigrade-like creatures are present, it could be theorised that there is a possibility that they would survive long distance travel before crashing into a planet and if it happens to contain H2O as well, the organism could spread on its surface.
The aforementioned facts led me to further investigate my questions brought forward by the Cosmic Bee. I pictured it as an entity that takes organic elements from a planet and drops them on other planets where some form of fertilisation could take place and life would have a chance. This is actually not a brand new concept but something that has been theorised: Panspermia. The website Panspermia-theory.com puts it nicely:
“Panspermia is a Greek word that translates literally as "seeds everywhere". The panspermia hypothesis states that the "seeds" of life exist all over the Universe and can be propagated through space from one location to another. Some believe that life on Earth may have originated through these "seeds".”
H2O, necessary to life as we know it, is made of two of the most common chemicals in the universe, Hydrogen and Oxygen. It is more and more plausible that Mars still harbours water, and that large oceans used to exist before something Bad happened. With that in mind, it is possible that Mars itself carried life, perhaps not as evolved as ours but it could have at least hosted small organisms. If the Panspermia Hypothesis is correct, for all we know life on Earth could have come from Mars. So far, at least 132 meteorites on earth have been found to come from Mars. What is crazy is that some of them contain water, and a martian meteorite by the name of Black Beauty, which was formed about 2.1 billion years ago was found only in 2014 and has even more water than any other meteorites from this planet we have found so far, approximately 6000 ppm bulk water. It is also one of the oldest. When did life appear on Earth? Approximately 3.8 billion years ago. When were there oceans on Mars? If you google it, the first answer will be before about 3.8 billion years ago. This is not evidence that life on Earth came from Mars but these are interesting coincidences. But where would life on Mars come from? Maybe from organisms travelling from another planet on a meteorite as well? Perhaps life is carried by seeds found across the universe, like pollen in fields?
I mentioned that water is made of two of the most common chemical compounds in the universe but so are we.
“The four most common chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth. We are not simply in the universe. The universe is in us.”
Panspermia does not explain the origin of life, but the place it could have in our universe. Perhaps a giant bee is not holding the seeds of life and spreading them throughout the cosmos, but maybe the universe is alive through these living organisms and regulates itself as our body regulates its cells.
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Bonus thought:
Now, why do we seem so alone in the universe? Even if we don’t consider Panspermia as a reasonable theory, there are many reasons to believe that it is highly unlikely that life has only appeared on planet Earth. There are billions of galaxies, many of which are older than ours, so surely a few civilisations have had the time to develop and should have been in touch by now. That is the Fermi Paradox and there are many chilling theories as to why we’ve not met anyone yet.
Sources:
Experimental evidence of pollination in marine flowers by invertebrate fauna, published in 2016 (https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12980)
Here are some cool pictures of said deep-sea creatures: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/160415-life-in-the-dark-dumbo-octopus-glowing-squid-blind-salamander/.
Wave-particle duality in photons: How x-ray scattering revealed the other side of the coin
Arthur Compton, 1935
In 1924, Louis de Broglie postulated a Nobel prize-winning idea: the ground-breaking proposition that all matter has wave and particle properties: wave-particle duality. With contemporaries such as Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger, he launched the 21st century into a quantum revolution. Reading his PhD which earned him this award, a recurring experiment is mentioned, led by A. H. Compton. Indeed, the electromagnetic nature of photons was already established in the early 20th century, it was not immediately apparent that photons could also exhibit particle-like behaviour. To investigate this, the experiment conducted by Compton, the Compton Scattering experiment, is reproduced even today. In this experiment, an X-ray photon is directed towards an electron, and the energy of the photon is measured both before and after the collision, aiming to ascertain whether the photon demonstrates particle-like characteristics.
Remote Replication
Students at The Open University were able to replicate this Nobel Prize-winning experiment remotely during their SXPS288-22J module: Remote Experiments in Physics. To this end, they had access to a laboratory based on the Milton Keynes campus with their OpenLab software, using equipment similar to what was originally used by Compton himself with graphite as a target. On an atomic level, the X-ray photon will be interacting with the electron at rest within the graphite, which will lead to the X-ray photon being scattered, and the electron being ejected. It was observed that when an X-ray photon collided with an electron, its energy was not conserved, indicating that some energy had been lost in the process. Furthermore, the magnitude of this energy loss was directly related to the angle between the photon's original trajectory and its new path. The greater the angle, the more significant the reduction in frequency was noted. This phenomenon resulted in the scattered X-rays having longer wavelengths compared to their original state. This well-established effect is known as the Compton effect or Compton scattering. The experiment aimed to investigate whether X-ray photons exhibit particle-like characteristics through the Compton Scattering phenomenon.
This hands-on experience enabled the students to deepen their understanding of the crucial process of correlating experimental data with theoretical models. Moreover, it shed light on a fundamental concept in quantum mechanics: the energy of light can lessen, implying that light behaves as a particle. By engaging in this experiment, the students gained valuable insights into the quantum nature of light and its behaviour under certain conditions.
From waves to particles
Before the Compton Effect was observed, in 1923, the wave nature of light had already been established. The debate surrounding the true nature of light had been ongoing for centuries. Christiaan Huygens, in 1690, proposed that light was composed of waves in Treatise on Light, while Isaac Newton, in his 1704 publication Optics, argued that light consisted of discrete particles called "corpuscles." These conflicting views sparked intense debates within the scientific community. However, in 1801, Thomas Young's famous double-slit experiment provided definitive evidence that light exhibited wave-like properties, validating Huygens' earlier speculations. The ground-breaking work of Compton, rather than refuting the wave nature of light, demonstrated that light could also behave as a particle, thus confirming a phenomenon known as wave-particle duality.
Implications
Comparing both models to interpret photons, it appears that the wave model and the particle model are dependent on the scale that is being used to interpret the photon’s behaviour: when dealing with an object that is comparable to the wavelength of light, one can use the wave model, and looking at levels where the energy is comparable to that of a photon, that is very small, it must be treated as a particle.
As we continue to delve into the mysteries of quantum mechanics, wave-particle duality remains at the forefront of scientific inquiry, guiding us towards new frontiers of knowledge. Its implications extend far beyond photons, influencing our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of the universe. The ongoing research in this field holds promise for breakthroughs in various scientific disciplines, from quantum computing to advanced materials.
Source: The Open University