Biological Decoherence Timescale Lab

Environment

Temperature 300 K

Superposition size Δx 200 nm

Environment coupling (collisions/s) 1e30

Presets

Live Readouts

Coherence100%

Decoherence time τ

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Rate Γ = 1/τ

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Thermal de Broglie λ_dB (environment)

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Animation clock is time-compressed for visibility — the τ readout above is the real physical value, not the on-screen speed.

How it works

A spatial superposition of separation Δx is destroyed whenever an environment particle scatters off it and "measures" which branch it hit. This simulator uses the standard scattering (Joos–Zeh) estimate for the decoherence rate, the same order-of-magnitude model Max Tegmark used in 2000 to test whether the brain's neurons could sustain the kind of macroscopic quantum coherence that "quantum healing" and Penrose–Hameroff-style theories require:

λ_dB = h / √(2π m_env k_B T)      thermal wavelength of environment particles
Γ    = f_hit · (Δx / λ_dB)²        decoherence rate
τ    = 1 / Γ                       decoherence time

Temperature — raises the thermal momentum of surrounding particles, shrinking λ_dB and speeding up decoherence.
Δx — the size of the "which-path" separation. Bigger superpositions are far more fragile: Γ grows with the square of Δx.
Environment coupling — how often the system gets hit by an environment particle (photon, water molecule, ion). Vacuum + cryostat ≈ 10³–10¹⁰ Hz; room-temperature air ≈ 10²⁵ Hz; warm cytoplasm/water ≈ 10³⁰–10³⁴ Hz.

Try the two presets: an isolated cryogenic qubit can hold coherence for a human-relevant time, but a nanometre-scale superposition inside warm, wet cytoplasm decoheres in roughly 10⁻¹³–10⁻²⁰ seconds — far too fast for any neural or "biofield" process to use it. That gap is exactly why claims of macroscopic quantum coherence driving healing or cognition run into trouble with mainstream physics; it does not by itself disprove such a mechanism, but it sets an extremely high bar that no proposed biological shielding mechanism has yet cleared.

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Superposition branches Environment particle

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