A Macroscopic Quantum Heat Engine: Nested Resonant Structures and the Entropic Stability of Life

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn search of the life spirit, or energy, that flows through the animal heart to make it beat, theologians, philosophers and scientists have for over two millennia been dissecting the heart down to its most basic structures. Recently, researchers have reached the pinnacle of the anatomists’ dream by determining the structure of a cardiac myosin thick filament at roughly twenty angstroms resolution. Yet, dissected down to individual atoms, the energy that flows through the heart is still nowhere to be found. The reason is that there exists in the whole of muscle a form of energy that does not exist in its constituent parts. To identify this energy, we must determine how the billions of randomly moving atoms that make up contractile proteins in muscle scale up to generate the steady unidirectional contraction of muscle. Here, I show that degrees of freedom of small structural elements physically, irreversibly, and discretely collapse to create larger structures with energy landscapes defined by entropic wells quantized by discrete degrees of freedom. The collapse of degrees of freedom across multiple thermal scales results in nested resonant structures from atoms on up to the filamentous structure of muscle, demonstrating that muscle is a quantum heat engine.