Quote:In physics, a system is 100% efficient if it can use 100% of the energy inputted to perform some type of energy-intensive work. In plants, nearly 100% of the incident photon energy from the Sun gets converted into electron energy that eventually powers the production of sugar: the photosynthetic process. Despite the fact that plants are not regularly ordered systems and that photon energy comes in a broad distribution, photosynthesis is nearly 100% efficient. [..]
"Ordered organization is actually less efficient than the disordered organization of biology, which we think is really interesting because biology tends to be disordered. This finding tells us that [the disordered nature of systems] may not just be an inevitable downside of biology, but organisms may have evolved to take advantage of it.”
In other words, what we normally consider a “bug” of biology, that biological systems are inherently disordered by many metrics, may actually be the key to how photosynthesis occurs at all in nature.
https://bigthink.com/sta...ficient-quantum-physics/
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