7pm - 8:30pm GMT
Wednesday 11 March 2026
Surrey Speaks Quantum: Does Life Need Quantum Mechanics?
Join us for Surrey Speaks Quantum, a captivating lecture series exploring the famously puzzling nature of quantum physics. In celebration of the 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology.
In our fourth lecture in the series, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Physics, Jim Al-Khalili will deliver his lecture entitled 'Does Life Need Quantum Mechanics'.
Free
University of Surrey
Guildford
Surrey
GU2 7XH
Advance booking is required.
Lecture Overview
How do living organisms maintain their highly ordered low entropy states? And might quantum mechanics play a role in this? Quantum biology is an exciting new field of interdisciplinary research, bringing together theoretical physics, computational chemistry and molecular biology, but it remains speculative and, some might say, even controversial. However, growing evidence is showing that non-trivial quantum effects, such as long-lived coherence, quantum entanglement and tunnelling may well play a functionally important role inside living cells. For example, enzymes utilise quantum tunnelling to accelerate biochemical reactions, while plants and bacteria make use of quantum coherence in photosynthesis to determine the most efficient route for photons from sunlight to reach the reaction centre where they can be converted into chemical energy. More intriguingly, it appears that some animals use quantum entanglement – what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” – to ‘see’ the earth’s magnetic field for directional information. In this talk Professor Al-Khalili will trace the origins of the field back to the 1930s, and examine how fragile quantum mechanical mechanisms previously thought to be confined to highly rarefied laboratory environments at temperatures close to absolute zero, might manage to play a role in the wet, warm biological world. He will also report on our latest results of our research group at Surrey showing the importance of proton tunnelling in DNA and how this can lead to genetic mutations.
About the speaker
Jim Al-Khalili CBE FRS is a theoretical physicist who is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus.
He received his PhD in theoretical nuclear physics from Surrey in 1989 and then spent two years as an SERC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College London before returning to Surrey in 1991. He was appointed lecturer in 1992 and, in 1994, was awarded an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship for five years during which time he established himself as a world leading authority on nuclear reaction theory of light exotic nuclei, publishing widely. Following this he reverted to a full-time lectureship in the Department at Surrey. He was elected Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 2000 and promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2001. He was promoted to professor of physics in 2005. He has published over a hundred papers in nuclear physics, quantum mechanics and quantum biology and has supervised 22 PhD students.
Jim is also a prominent author and broadcaster. He has written 14 books on popular science and the history of science, between them translated into twenty-six languages. His book, The World According to Physics, was shortlisted for the Royal Society Book Prize. His latest, published in 2022 is The Joy of Science. He is a regular presenter of TV science documentaries, such as the Bafta nominated Chemistry: a volatile history, and has hosted the long-running weekly BBC Radio 4 programme, The Life Scientific, since 2011.
Despite his profile as a public scientist, Jim has continued to teach undergraduate physics students in an unbroken run of 32 years since 1992. He is still very research active, with five current PhD students working on different aspects of quantum mechanics and open quantum systems and is co-director of the Leverhulme Doctoral Training Centre for Quantum Biology and leads the Quantum Foundations and Technologies Research Group in the School of Mathematics and Physics. He is also Principle Investigator on a research project on the Quantum Arrow of Time.
Jim is a past president of the British Science Association and a recipient of the Royal Society's Michael Faraday medal and the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal, the Institute of Physics Kelvin Medal and the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication. He received an OBE in 2007 and a CBE in 2022 for ‘services to science’.