Biophotons: low signal/noise ratio reveals crucial events

Abstract

We study the emission of photons from germinating seeds using an experimental technique designed to detect photons of extremely small intensity when the signal/noise ratio is low. We analyze the dark count signal in the absence of germinating seeds as well as the photon emission during the germination process. The technique of analysis adopted here was originally designed to measure the temporal complexity of astrophysical, sociological and physiological processes. The foundation of this method, called Diffusion Entropy Analysis (DEA), rests on Kolmogorov complexity. The updated version of DEA used in this paper is designed to determine if the signal complexity is generated by either non-ergodic crucial events with a non-stationary correlation function or by the infinite memory of a stationary but non-integrable correlation function or by a mixture of both processes. We find that dark count yields the ordinary scaling, thereby showing that no complexity of either kinds may occur in the absence of any seeds in the chamber. In the presence of seeds in the chamber anomalous scaling emerges, reminiscent of that found in neuro-physiological processes. However, this is a mixture of both processes and with the progress of germination the non-ergodic component tends to vanish and complexity is dominated by the stationary infinite memory. We argue that this may be a sign of quantum coherence that according to some authors is the important ingredient of cognition.