Enchanted by a tiny swimmer

Rachel Berkowitz’s Search and Discovery story “A tiny swimmer generates rapid, far-reaching signals in water ” (Physics Today, September 2019, page 22) was fascinating—that such rich physics and biology could be found in a little creature in a pond in Palo Alto, California. It started, as Berkowitz writes, with Manu Prakash noticing a funny little swimmer that could contract so quickly it seemed to disappear, and it ended with hydrodynamic modeling of trigger waves. ¹

This is the kind of investigation I think young scientists, myself included, dream about: We notice something in our environment and then seek to understand it. Our beautiful odyssey brings together ideas that range from spaghettification of black hole explorers to “the fractal nature of cellular connectivity near the critical point” ¹ and demonstrates how interdisciplinary nature can be. It shows the richness of the world around us and reminds us that mysteries lie in the most unexpected places.

As I look out my window at the birds that will disappear with the advent of winter, I wonder how a Baltimore oriole can fly thousands of miles at night and find its way to the exact spot it was at a year ago. With my interest in quantum physics, I wonder, for example, if nature has developed an organism that uses quantum correlations akin to those characterizing entanglement for communication. With hundreds of millions of years of evolution, nature has many surprises. If it is possible and useful, nature has done it. It is up to us to explore.