Cancer and QM

[USS Triumphant]

I have a question that I've been thinking about for a while, having had several loved ones get cancer and having lost one to it - and having had one of my best friends become unable to ever be a mother because of it. I have a feeling it may seem silly to some, but I'm serious - perhaps just undereducated about the subject involved.

My understanding is that cancer is caused (or some cancers are caused, but these are the ones I'm thinking of) by mutations in cells, which then pass their corrupted DNA on through (usually accelerated?) cell division and grow all out of control, either as tumors or as individual cancer cells that spread through an organ or system and cause problems until they're stopped or the organism dies.

I also understand that these mutations are often caused by EM or particle bombardment - both of which are things that operate at a level where the physics of QM applies.

I'm familiar, at least at a basic level, with Schrodinger's Cat and the QM idea that he was trying to relate with that: quantum indeterminacy and collapsing the waveform into a single probability level or "reality" by measuring it.

So the question is: Does a patient actually even *have* cancer until it is measured by testing and observed to be there? Or is the cancer in a state of quantum indeterminacy? And if so, would this be a case where not going to the doctor could potentially keep one from manifesting cancer if we're talking about patients who are not yet exhibiting symptoms otherwise or whom are exhibiting symptoms that aren't definitively those of cancer? If not, why not?

Thanks for humoring me. I finally thought to post this today because I just found out that my mother-in-law will be going on the 19th to find out if she has thyroid cancer. I'm not looking to talk her out of going to be tested. It just brought the question back to mind.

 

[Kor]

Wellll.. cancer has been observed and documented since long before modern high-tech diagnostic methods were developed.
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-basics/history-of-cancer.html

Kor

 

[Robert Maxwell]

It's not about being observed or measured, but having the opportunity to interact with other matter or energy. Since cancer cells are inside the body, there's no quantum weirdness to deal with--there's always plenty of other matter to interact with.

Schrodinger's Cat is a thought experiment and not something you should take too literally. In real life, if you had a cat in a box set to be poisoned via a radioactive decay timer, all that's going to vary is how long it takes for the poison to be released, and statistically you can narrow that time down to a discrete window--it's not as if the cat is doomed in one scenario but spared in another. You leave the cat in there long enough for sufficient decay to happen, it's dead.

But anyway, don't take words like "observe" and "measure" too literally when it comes to quantum mechanics. Ultimately, it's about whether and when a particle/wave with multiple possible states interacts with something else--anything else--that would force it into a definitive state. Here on Earth, in mundane circumstances (like human physiology), there is no quantum weirdness to be concerned with.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Roget Penrose has suggested that the threshold for quantum state reduction due to gravitational interaction is the Planck mass (ca. 20 microgrammes or 2 x 10^-5 grammes). The average mass of a human cell is 2 x 10^-9 grammes so it might be conceivable that up to 10,000 cells could be in a superposed state. At the molecular level of DNA, some theorise that superposition is an important factor in several biological processes. Experiments with quite large molecules have demonstrated quantum superposition but none have so far demonstrated the level at which spontaneous state reduction occurs.

 

[publiusr]

Brownian motion may also play a part
http://www.pnas.org/content/72/8/3111.abstract

I have this image in my head. The Beatles are on the run from Leo McKern again--but they find themselves in the future.

They jump into a mosh pit--and are carried--quite by accident--to an exit.

Leo the square says--"the shortest distance between two points is a straight line"--and heads for the exit---but constantly gets bumped by the dancing--and gets pinned to a wall.

The Bealtes escape? Happy biology at the small scale.

Leo's fate?

That's what I see happening to nanobots that try to do anything useful.

The crew from THIS OLD HOUSE would have had a better chance building a brownstone on Omaha beach while being shelled by 88s.