WHICH HOPE IS NOT DESPAIR? – “TO SEE OR NOT TO SEE”

Norse mythology considers Hope (Vön) to be the slobber dripping from the mouth of Fenris Wolf: their concept of courage rated most highly a cheerful bravery in the absence of hope.

Hope Transcends all!

HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS THAT PERCHES IN THE SOUL AND SINGS THE TUNE WITHOUT THE WORDS AND NEVER STOPS AT ALL.

— Emily Dickinson

"TO SEE OR NOT TO SEE, THAT IS THE QUESTION."

This post is written with RISING HOPE!

*****

MRS DALLOWAY SHOWS THE WAY

I’M A CENTURION NOW, 100 YEARS OLD!

MRS DALLOWAY SHOWS THE WAY to the gran turismo that accentuated literary perfection with her daunting London on that day in 1923. OR DID I SAVAGELY APE ULYSSES? AND THEN TO PLACATE ANY BACKFIRE I SHOT OFF VITRIOLIC GUN UPON JAMES JOYCE.

“What a lark! What a plunge!..There! Out it boomed. [The Big Ben] First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”

And so, the working title of Mrs Dalloway was The Hours. The novel originated from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister". In autumn 1922, Woolf began to think of the "Mrs Dalloway" short story as the first chapter of her new novel, and she completed the manuscript in late autumn 1924 and published in May 1925.

Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. It was on the August 7, 2024 Mrs Dalloway made her London walk.

Mrs Dalloway is commonly thought to be a response to James Joyce's Ulysses. Both novels use the stream of consciousness technique to follow the thoughts of two characters, one older and one younger, during one day in a bustling city. Woolf herself, writing in 1928, denied any deliberate "method" to the book, saying instead that the structure came about "without any conscious direction".

Woolf unleashed her tirade against Ulysses saying:

"I finished Ulysses, & think it is a mis-fire. Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. ..I feel that myriads of tiny bullets pepper one & spatter one; but one does not get one deadly wound straight in the face—as from Tolstoy, for instance; but it is entirely absurd to compare him with Tolstoy."

The Hogarth Press, run by Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard, had to turn down the chance to publish Ulysses in 1919 because of the obscenity law in England.

None the less Mrs Dalloway liver ever after. In a related 2002 film, The Hours depicts a single day in the lives of three women across generations affected by Mrs Dalloway: Woolf writing it in 1923, a Los Angeles housewife reading it in 1951, and a New York literary editor living it in 2001. Adapted from the 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham, the cast features Nicole Kidman as Woolf, Julianne Moore as housewife Laura, and Meryl Streep as editor Clarissa. Cunningham titled his novel The Hours after Woolf's working title for Mrs Dalloway. At the 75th Academy Awards, it received nine nominations, including Best Picture, with Kidman winning Best Actress. The film and novel were adapted into an opera in 2022.

www.allauthors.info tracks down those purple patches in the making of literature.

The global brain is neuroscience-inspired and futurological vision of the planetary information and communications technology network that interconnects all humans and their technological artifacts. As this network stores ever more information, takes over ever more functions of coordination and communication from traditional organizations, and becomes increasingly intelligent, it increasingly plays the role of a brain for the planet Earth.

In the 12th century, the medieval Andalusian philosopher Averroes , asserted that all humans share the same intellect and called it – ‘The unity of the intellect’ in situ with Aristotle's On the Soul to explain how universal knowledge is possible.

Some of the underlying ideas were already expressed by Nikola Tesla in the 19th century and were written about by many others before him. Even H.G. Wells wrote World Brain – a collection of essays in 1938. In 1982, Peter Russell wrote his book called The Global Brain Awakens and the name was coined. Towards becoming the Global Brain, the first algorithms that could turn the world-wide web into a collectively intelligent network were proposed by Francis Heylighen and Johan Bollen in 1996.

As the Internet increasingly ties its users together into a single information processing system that functions as part of the collective nervous system of the planet. The intelligence of this network is collective or distributed: it is not centralized or localized in any particular individual, organization or computer system. Therefore, no one can command or control it. Rather, it self-organizes or emerges from the dynamic networks of interactions between its components. This is a property typical of complex adaptive systems.

The World Wide Web in particular resembles the organization of a brain with its web pages (playing a role similar to neurons) connected by hyperlinks (playing a role similar to synapses), together forming an associative network along which information propagates. This analogy becomes stronger with the rise of social media, such as Facebook, where links between personal pages represent relationships in a social network along which information propagates from person to person.

allauthors.info finds OUR UNIVERSE IF EXPANDING FASTER THAN THOUGHT; recent findings in stellar physics and cosmology:

I’m measuring the expansion of this universe. I was first discovered on 3rd August 1596. I was meant to be a reference star and remained so ever after. I’m the star Mira meaning astonishing or wonderful in Latin 600 billion years old and 300 light years from Earth. I was the first variable star to be recorded by the astronomer David Fabricius beginning on August 3, 1596. I’m a pulsating variable red giant star, the first non-supernova variable star discovered, with the possible exception of Algol.

Now I’ve become the prototype of the Mira variables. Mira variables are a type of giant star that go through regular cycles of expanding and contracting. These cycles cause their brightness to vary in a predictable way.

Mira variables are relatively cool and they are in the late stages of their life.

There is a strong relationship between how bright they are and how long their pulsation cycles last. This relationship allows astronomers to use them as "standard candles."

A standard candle is an object in space whose true brightness is known. By comparing how bright the object appears from Earth to how bright it actually is, scientists can calculate how far away it is. This is a key method used to measure distances in the universe, forming part of what astronomers call the "extragalactic distance ladder" to measure the expansion of the universe—known as the Hubble flow.

The rate at which the universe is expanding today is called the Hubble constant. In cosmology it helps us determine the size and age of the universe. However, there's currently a major puzzle in the scientific community known as the "Hubble tension." When astronomers measure the Hubble constant using other stars.

The Hubble constant has been a focal point of debate in recent years, with different measurement methods yielding discrepant values, leading to what is known as the “Hubble tension.” This discrepancy suggests that the universe may be expanding faster in the present day than we would expect based on our standard models of cosmology.

allauthors.info keeps vigilant over ominous potboilers:

WHEN FACT MEETS FICTION IN MEMOIRS

When you put foot in other’s mouth too, there’s double whammy. Memoirs that scintillate history in making, when revealed into a cooked recipe exposé, backfire and run into hall of infamy.

Angel at the Fence

Winfrey called the story "the single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we've ever told on the air." Rosenblat appeared twice on The Oprah Winfrey Show before the book's announced publication. The book was scheduled for publication by Berkley Books, a division of Penguin Group USA, but got cancelled.

Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived is a Holocaust is a memoir by Herman Rosenblat in which the author invented the story that, while he was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp, a young girl from the outside would pass him food through the fence daily and years later they accidentally met and married. Although the author fabricated details about how he met his wife, he is an authentic Holocaust survivor.

A Million Little Pieces

It became an Oprah's Book Club selection. The author James Frey had it published it from Doubleday Books, a division of Random House that became a bestselling memoir in which the author created and exaggerated significant details of his drug addiction and recovery. However, when the book's authenticity was called into question, the author and publisher Nan Talese were invited back and publicly scolded by Winfrey in a live face-to-face confrontation. The televised showdown was highlighted all over by the press. The Washington Post's Richard Cohen went gaga over the confrontation that he crowned Winfrey "Mensch of the Year."

Forbidden Love

Norma Khouri wrote Forbidden Love that got published as Honor Lost in the United States and was published by Bantam Books in Australia and Doubleday in New York. It was purported to be the story of the author's best friend in Jordan, Dalia, who fell in love with a Christian soldier. Dalia's Muslim father was not told of the relationship, and when he eventually discovered it, he stabbed Dalia to death in a so-called honor killing.

The book was exposed as a hoax after the literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald revealed that Khouri had not lived in Jordan during the book's timeframe, and apart from a three-week stay to research her book, had not lived there since her early childhood.

Odd Man Out

Matt McCarthy penned his memoir, Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit and got published by Viking, a division of Penguin Group USA. It describes McCarthy's summer as a minor league pitcher. He writes about playing with racist teammates who take steroids: however, statistics from that season, combined with transaction listings and interviews with former teammates, suggest that much of the book is false.

The genre of literary hoax runs much longer adding grist to the publishing mill and heckling readers into a tizzy.

In China circa 1000 BC, a person suspected of lying was required to fill one’s mouth with a handful of dry rice and after a while it was to be spat out. If the spat rice remained dry, the suspect was found guilty of fraud. They assumed that experiencing fear and anxiety out of lying is accompanied by decreased salivation and a dry mouth. In European courts too, priests administered consecrated meal at the end of worship. The accused would be stuffed with a piece of dry bread and a piece of hard sheep’s cheese. The accused was exonerated if he or she managed to swallow in one bite without difficulty. However, if the person choked or suffocated, the test brought a guilty verdict.

1991 born, Belle Gibson claimed that her mother changed her name five times. In 2010, she became a mother at age 18. Gibson launched The Whole Pantry mobile app in August 2013, at age 21. The Whole Pantry app was fabulously downloaded 200,000 times within its first month. It was voted Apple's Best Food and Drink App of 2013. Gibson soon after signed a book deal with Lantern Books, an imprint of Penguin Books, for an accompanying table-top cookbook, which was published in October 2014. She further worked with Apple Inc. in September 2014 to transition the app as a privileged pre-installed default third-party inclusion in the Apple Watch's April 2015 launch. By early 2015, it was estimated that in excess of A$1 million had been made in sales of The Whole Pantry app and the book. Gibson chronicled her battle with cancer on a blog of the same name, but "doubts about her claims surfaced after she failed to deliver a promised $300,000 donation to a charity".

In late April 2015, Gibson gave an interview to The Australian Women's Weekly, in which she admitted to having fabricated all her cancer claims. Gibson attributed her deceit to her upbringing, and specifically to neglect by her now-estranged mother, claiming to having been forced to take care of herself and her brother since the age of five.

Gibson fabricated claims of having had multiple cancers that were self-treated through diet and alternative medicine. Again she cooked up claims of undergoing multiple heart surgeries and having strokes. All this chicanery intended for making fraudulent claims of donating $300,000 of income to charities.

The facade of fame crumbled into a hall of infamy to make a historic reel in real life. Gibson is portrayed by Kaitlyn Dever in the 2025 Netflix drama limited series Apple Cider Vinegar. Belle picked the gauntlet to inveigle everyone to donate and ran the gauntlet aplomb unscathed into the tinsel town.

www.allauthors.info TRAILS THE HIDDEN PAST:

CHRONICLES OF MY 92 LOST YEARS

 Any authors around? I remained hidden in Portugal for 92 years. Even now the males are eluding you all. You’ve never seen our males doing tap dance for their ladies. I was found after a two-year long spider hunt while you ravaged those forest trenches. We’re Portuguese encore and remain in no other region. We live in burrows with webbed walls and a lid at the entrance, capturing all passing prey – devouring portal of force majeure infamy.

 None of you writers have written about us. Some Gabriela Marquez may pen ’92-years of Solitude’, forced upon Fagilde’s trapdoor spider. The only specimens found in 1931 were gutted in the great Bocage Museum fire of 1978 and thereafter this species had not been scientifically recorded for nearly a century.

92 years later in 2023, arachnologists rediscovered our species in northern Portugal, noticing a female with ten offspring and recorded females to be dark brown that can grow up to 2.2 cm long. But what a parody you have made of your ultra tech scientific achievements that for now, you’ve no information about our males and their lifecycle.

Our DNA has now monikered us Nemesia berlandi. We are considered one of the rarest spiders on earth – whom you now call Fagilde's trapdoor spider or buraqueira-de-Fagilde in Portuguese  of the family Nemesiidae, currently only known from Fagilde and the adjacent village of Vila Garcia, both in the Mangualde municipality of the Beira Alta region of Portugal, in the isolated slopes of the Dão River valley.

The bravado researchers are thumping their chests hoping this discovery will contribute to the preservation of our species, especially in light of the threat posed by agricultural development and frequent forest fires in their habitat due to climate change.

PHOTO:  AndyScott - Own work            

Book trailers & professional book reviews copiously roll out from www.allauthors.info  We ideate and improvise your books.

allauthor.info laments for these imperiled sui generis doyens now gasping for solitude!

The humans are the devastating race ever! And I took refuge in the secluded pristine Blue Mountains of Sydney till I was hunted down three decades back. And what a war cry leapt out from hominids equating me with a savage plant dinosaur. I feel so belittled.  And now I’m called out in various names like Willemi Pine and Wollemi nobilis and some passing me off as even a Christmas tree in a pot. And you humans call it resurgence? What an ordeal I’m suffering. My majestic canyon rife with humongous pines is now shackled with research hacks and I’m being grown at alien sites abhor some to me. We’re not even considered true pines. And choppers are chopping the wilderness shrieking with adventurous escapades and bushfires are on the rise, charring me to extinction. On one hand I’m called an Australian botanical icon and the next moment my sobriety is ruffed up in cloistered houses. However we bear the species of nobilis to oblige the humans with servility.                                      

At BookReviews.Today, we improvise story-lines for fiction writers to stand apart from run of the mill drudgery.

 YOU’RE 89 SECONDS TO DOOM!

 The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has set the clock to 89 seconds before midnight - the theoretical point of annihilation. That is one second closer than it was set last year. The Doomsday Clock depicts how close humanity is to Armageddon. At the time of founding the clock in 1947, it read, “IT IS SEVEN MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT’.

IS THIS JUST A METAPHORICAL CLOCK WHIPPING UP FEAR PSYCHOSIS?
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 by none other than Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project.
The Chicago-based nonprofit created the clock two years later in 1947 during the Cold War tensions that followed World War II to warn the public about how close humankind was to destroying the world. It was created using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet.
The Doomsday Clock is set every year by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes nine Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to global catastrophe caused by man-made technologies.
The organization says, it is the United States, China and Russia that have the prime responsibility to pull the world back from the brink, and urged good-faith international dialogue.
"The factors shaping this year's decision - nuclear risk, climate change, the potential misuse of advances in biological science and a variety of other emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence - were not new in 2024. But we have seen insufficient progress in addressing the key challenges, and in many cases this is leading to increasingly negative and worrisome effects," said Daniel Holz, chair of the Bulletin's Science and Security Board.

"SETTING THE DOOMSDAY CLOCK AT 89 SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT IS A WARNING TO ALL WORLD LEADERS,"
- Daniel Holz, chair of the Bulletin's Science and Security Board.
.
"This is a bleak picture but it is not yet irreversible." -Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia's former president,

ARE WE TILTING AT WINDMILLS WITH MORBID IDEAS OR ARE WE INDEED SAILING CLOSE TO THE WIND?

At BookReviews.Today , we add polymathic grist to the milling storylines for authors to improvise their fiction.

*******

BookReviews.Today finds memoirs are often creaking when later another memoir is penned by its other character countering it and at times the memoir gets heaving too when candid narration altogether is at stake! Memoirs very often suffer the brunt of vilification drive and yet it pops up in cinematic rendition bearing the testimony of a corroborated episode. And in this case the first wife also the sister of his own aunt either assisted or desisted in winning him a Nobel Prize. Set in Peru during the 1950s, it is the torrid love story of an 18-year-old student who falls for a 32-year-old divorcee. The novel is based on the author's real life experience. 

In 1977, Vargas Llosa was elected as a member of the Peruvian Academy of Language. The same year, he brought out Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (La tía Julia y el escribidor), based in part on his marriage to his first wife, Julia Urquidi, to whom he dedicated the novel. Things turned awry when later Julia Urquidi wrote a memoir, Lo que Varguitas no dijo (What Little Vargas Didn't Say). Julia gives her personal account of their relationship accusing Vargas Llosa's account of exaggeration with many negative points in their courtship and marriage while downplaying her role of assisting his literary career.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter chronicles the scriptwriter's rise in popularity, and subsequent descent into madness, in tandem with the protagonist's affair. It alternates between Mario's account of his life and episodes of Camacho's serials, which become increasingly unhinged as the novel progresses.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter stands out as one of the most striking cases of how the language and imagery of popular culture can be pitted in literature. The novel was adapted in 1990 into a Hollywood feature film, Tune in Tomorrow.

Tune in Tomorrow is a 1990 American comedy film directed by Jon Amiel that is based on the 1977 Mario Vargas Llosa novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, and was released under that same title in many countries. Relocated from the novel's setting in 1950s-era Lima, Peru to New Orleans, Louisiana that same decade, it stars Peter Falk, Keanu Reeves and Barbara Hershey in a story surrounding a radio drama.

Roger Ebert gave the movie 2 and a half stars out of 4, noting that "sometimes we laugh easily, sometimes uncertainly, and sometimes we just look at the screen and wonder why anyone thought that was funny."  The Washington Post, was more positive about the film: "A tri-layered tale of love, creative impulses and dial-spinning, it comes and it goes, evocative and a little bit magical, flawed but forgivably so."

BookReviews.Today sends this obituary of the patriarch of Latin American Boom, Mario Vargas Llosa.

The Christmas Truce - 'live and let live’

Roughly 100,000 British and German troops were involved in the informal cessations of hostility along the Western Front. The Germans placed candles on their trenches and on Christmas trees, and then continued the celebration by singing Christmas carols. The British responded by singing carols of their own. The truce occurred five months after hostilities had begun.

This testimonial comes from a French soldier about fraternisation in sectors where German and French companies opposed each other. Gustave Berthier mentions "On Christmas Day the Boches made a sign showing they wished to speak to us. They said they didn't want to shoot. ... They were tired of making war, they were married like me, they didn't have any differences with the French but with the English".

ON 25th DECEMBER Captain Robert Miles, King's Shropshire Light Infantry, who was attached to the Royal Irish Rifles, recalled in an edited letter about Christmas Day. “We are having the most extraordinary Christmas Day imaginable. A sort of unarranged and quite unauthorized but perfectly understood and scrupulously observed truce exists between us and our friends in front. The funny thing is it only seems to exist in this part of the battle line – on our right and left we can all hear them firing away as cheerfully as ever. The thing started last night – a bitter cold night, with white frost – soon after dusk when the Germans started shouting 'Merry Christmas, Englishmen' to us. Of course our fellows shouted back and presently large numbers of both sides had left their trenches, unarmed, and met in the debatable, shot-riddled, no man's land between the lines. Here the agreement – all on their own – came to be made that we should not fire at each other until after midnight tonight. The men were all fraternizing in the middle (we naturally did not allow them too close to our line) and swapped cigarettes and lies in the utmost good fellowship. Not a shot was fired all night.

Of the Germans he wrote: "They are distinctly bored with the war.... In fact, one of them wanted to know what on earth we were doing here fighting them." The truce in that sector continued into Boxing Day.

AND SOON ON 30TH  DECEMBER 1914, HE WAS KILLED IN ACTION.

A German Lieutenant, Johannes Niemann, wrote "grabbed my binoculars and looking cautiously over the parapet saw the incredible sight of our soldiers exchanging cigarettes, schnapps and chocolate with the enemy".

THE WORST MARITIME TRAGEDY STRUCK THIS DAY, 30 JANUARY 1945; 9,400 PEOPLE DIED, MAKING IT THE LARGEST LOSS OF LIFE IN A SINGLE SHIP SINKING IN HISTORY

LITERATURE THAT SPAWNED UPON THE SINKING OF MV WILHEM GUSTLOFF

MV Wilhelm Gustloff was a German military transport ship which was sunk on 30 January 1945 by Soviet submarine S-13 in the Baltic Sea. It was the first purpose-built cruise ship for the purpose were to provide recreational and cultural activities for German functionaries and workers, including concerts, cruises, and other holiday trips, and to serve as a public relations tool that would present "a more acceptable image of the Third Reich".

Wilhelm Gustloff was soon sighted by the Soviet submarine S-13. The submarine sensor on board the escorting torpedo boat had frozen, rendering it inoperable, as had her anti-aircraft guns, leaving the vessels defenseless. The three torpedoes that were fired successfully all struck Wilhelm Gustloff on her port side. The first struck the ship's bow, causing watertight doors to seal off the area where off-duty crew members were sleeping. The second hit the accommodations for the women's naval auxiliary, located in the ship's drained swimming pool. It dislodged the pool tiles at high velocity, which caused high casualties; only three of the 373 women quartered there survived. The third torpedo scored a direct hit on the engine room located amidships, disabling all power and communications.

Reportedly, only nine lifeboats could be lowered; the rest had frozen in their davits and had to be broken free. About twenty minutes after the torpedoes' impact, Wilhelm Gustloff suddenly listed so dramatically to port that the lifeboats lowered on the high starboard side crashed into the ship's tilting side, destroying many lifeboats and spilling their occupants.

Less than 40 minutes after being struck, Wilhelm Gustloff was lying on her side. She sank bow-first ten minutes later, in 44 m (144 ft) of water.German forces were able to rescue 1,252 people while all the four captains on Wilhelm Gustloff survived her sinking.

The ship was originally intended to be named Adolf Hitler but instead was named after Wilhelm Gustloff, leader of the Nazi Party's Swiss branch, who had been assassinated by a Jewish medical studeNT. Adolf Hitler decided on the name change after sitting next to Gustloff's widow during his memorial service.

Günter Grass wrote Im Krebsgang, translated into English as Crabwalk. It combines historical elements, such as the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, with fictional elements, such as the book's major characters and events. Günter Grass said in an interview with The New York Times in April 2003: "One of the many reasons I wrote Crabwalk was to take the subject away from the extreme Right... They said the tragedy of Wilhelm Gustloff was a war crime. It wasn't. It was terrible, but it was a result of war, a terrible result of war."

DÍA DAS LETRAS GALEGAS

GALICIAN LITERATURE DAY - MAY 17

María Rosalía Rita de Castro (23 February 1837 – 15 July 1885), was a Galician poet and novelist, considered one of the most important figures of the 19th-century Spanish literature and modern lyricism. As the greatest Galician cultural icon, she led the emergence of the literary Galician language. Through her work, she projected multiple emotions, including the yearning for the celebration of Galician identity and culture, and female empowerment.

Rosalía published her first collection of poetry in Galician, Cantares gallegos ("Galician Songs"), on 17 May 1863. This date, 17 May, is now known as the Día das Letras Galegas ("Galician Literature Day"). It all started a century later on 17 May1963 to commemorate Rosalía's achievement  every year.

In 2019 the International Astronomical Union named the star HD 149143 as Rosalíadecastro in honour of Rosalía de Castro whose work often referenced the night and celestial objects. The exoplanet companion was named Riosar in honour of the Sar River in Spain that was present in much of the literary work of the Spanish author Rosalía de Castro.

******

FOUR OUT OF FIVE JAPANESE NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS FOR MEDICINE \ PHYSIOLOGY ARE IMMUNOLOGISTS

The Nobel Prize for Physics in 2025 has been awarded for the discovery of macroscopic quantum tunneling and energy quantization in electric circuit.

Quantum tunneling is barrier penetration wherein an object such as an electron or atom passes through a potential energy barrier that, according to classical mechanics, should not be passable due to the object not having sufficient energy to pass or surmount the barrier. Tunneling is a consequence of the wave nature of matter, where the quantum wave function describes the state of a particle or other physical system, and wave equations such as the Schrödinger equation describe their behavior.

Quantum tunnelling is among the central non-trivial quantum effects in quantum biology. Here it is important both as electron tunnelling and proton tunnelling. Electron tunnelling is a key factor in many biochemical redox reactions (photosynthesis, cellular respiration) as well as enzymatic catalysis. Proton tunnelling is a key factor in spontaneous DNA mutation.

Spontaneous mutation occurs when normal DNA replication takes place after a particularly significant proton has tunnelled. A hydrogen bond joins DNA base pairs. A double well potential along a hydrogen bond separates a potential energy barrier. It is believed that the double well potential is asymmetric, with one well deeper than the other such that the proton normally rests in the deeper well. For a mutation to occur, the proton must have tunnelled into the shallower well. The proton's movement from its regular position is called a tautomeric transition. If DNA replication takes place in this state, the base pairing rule for DNA may be jeopardised, causing a mutation. Per-Olov Lowdin was the first to develop this theory of spontaneous mutation within the double helix. Other instances of quantum tunnelling-induced mutations in biology are believed to be a cause of ageing and cancer.

Early pioneers of quantum physics saw applications of quantum mechanics in biological problems. Erwin Schrödinger's 1944 book What Is Life? discussed applications of quantum mechanics in biology. Schrödinger introduced the idea of an "aperiodic crystal" that contained genetic information in its configuration of covalent chemical bonds. He further suggested that mutations are introduced by "quantum leaps". Other pioneers Niels Bohr, Pascual Jordan, and Max Delbrück argued that the quantum idea of complementarity was fundamental to the life sciences. In 1963, Per-Olov Löwdin published proton tunneling as another mechanism for DNA mutation. In his paper, he stated that there is a new field of study called "quantum biology". In 1979, the Soviet and Ukrainian physicist Alexander Davydov published the first textbook on quantum biology entitled Biology and Quantum Mechanics.

This year’s Nobel Physics Prize instills furtherance of quantum tunneling in biological sciences.