Flying home with quantum physics

In this week's podcast we reach into our archive for a favourite story we first heard back in 2010!

The quantum world is usually associated with the weirder end of physics, including strange phenomena like superposition or quantum entanglement, the "spooky action at a distance" as Einstein called it. But it turns out that quantum mechanical processes occur in living systems too. Some species of birds use quantum mechanics to navigate and studying how they do it might actually help us with building quantum computers.

Back in 2010 we spoke to the physicists Simon Benjamin and Erik Gauger at the conference Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality at the University of Oxford to find out more.

For more information you can read our ridiculously short introduction to some basic quantum mechanics, and the accompanying article for this podcast.