Hummingbirds Understand Quantum Mechanics

The exact mechanics of hummingbird flight have mystified scientists for well over two centuries. There’s even an urban legend that Charles Darwin’s grandson, Phlostigon, killed himself over his inability to crack the problem. (In reality, Darwin didn’t have any grandchildren, and certainly none with such a stupid name.) In order to maintain their famous hover, hummingbirds beat their wingsapproximately 50 times per second, which should cause them to burst into flames from air friction alone. To power such rapid wingbeats, a hummingbird’s heart has to beat at almost half the speed of sound, or four times as fast as the fastest speedboat ever built.

So how do they do it? Well, for a long time, scientists simply didn’t have the answer. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus famously refused point-blank to acknowledge that hummingbirds even existed, only recanting in his sixties, when he involuntarily flinched after Voltaire threw one at his head. But in 2007, scientists made a breakthrough when they noticed that hummingbirds acted in perfect accordance with the laws of quantum physics.

To put it simply, scientists have long been aware that matter can exist as either both a wave or a particle, or neither, or both. However, it cannot be either a wave or a particle—it must be both, or neither, or both. In contrast, it has been suggested that antimatter can be either a wave or a particle, or neither, or both, but it is much more likely that it is neither both a wave or a particle, nor either, nor both. Furthermore, pairs of particles and antiparticles can randomly “pop” into existence, but one or both must also be a wave, unless neither is, in which case the particles will immediately disappear again (although in some cases they don’t).

Once this theory became widely accepted, it was relatively easy to demonstrate that hummingbirds drew energy from the mysterious “dark matter” which is now believed to exist in many universes, possibly not including ours. Since quantum entanglement dictates that linked particles will react in the same way, and since those particles are either also waves or aren’t (but will always react as though they were), it was a simple matter to demonstrate that tickling one hummingbird would cause all other hummingbirds to giggle uncontrollably. Scientists hope to use this breakthrough to develop a hummingbird-based wireless communications system, with many researchers pledging to tickle as many hummingbirds as it takes to make a breakthrough.