In January 2025, the engineers at PsiQuantum achieved a milestone that had eluded the field for decades: a manufacturable, fault-tolerant photonic quantum computing chipset. But buried in their breakthrough was a fundamental physics problem: you cannot create a photon with absolute certainty, meaning the machine had to be built from inherently unreliable parts. To make it work, they devised a brilliant architecture involving probabilistic generation, heralded verification, and massive multiplexing to turn stochastic noise into reliable computation.

But they weren't the first to invent it. As we reveal in this episode of Relatively Human, that exact architectural strategy was deployed two billion years ago inside your own cells. We explore the eerie structural convergence between the world’s newest quantum computer and the mitochondrial respiratory chain. It turns out that the engineering solution for extracting reliable work from stochastic quantum events is universal, whether you are building with silicon waveguides or biological proteins.

We take you down to the nanometer scale to witness the machinery of life operating at the quantum edge. You will meet the electron transport chain, where electrons tunnel across protein gaps in a display of raw quantum mechanics. You will see ATP synthase, a biological rotary motor that spins at 8,000 RPM with near-perfect thermodynamic efficiency, producing your body weight in fuel every single day. The parallel we draw is not a metaphor; it is a precise, four-part engineering match regarding how systems verify and deploy resources.

Why does this convergence happen? We move beyond the biology to the information theory that constrains it. From Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety to the thermodynamic costs of Landauer’s Principle, we examine the deep physical laws that force different engineers—human and evolutionary—to the same solutions. We ask the hard question: Is this architectural match a coincidence, or is it a hidden theorem of physics we haven’t discovered yet?

Join us for a journey that moves from the clean rooms of a semiconductor foundry to the inner membrane of the mitochondrion. We strictly separate established science from speculation, distinguishing where the mechanisms differ and where the architecture aligns. This is a story about the limits of physics, the creativity of evolution, and the humbling realization that nature solved our hardest engineering problems long before we even knew they existed.

In 1925, Ronald Fisher created a formula to estimate parameters from noisy data. Today, Fisher information has escaped statistics to become a fundamental quantity in quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology, and thermodynamics. From the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to the rate of natural selection, the same mathematical structure governs the flow of information.

This episode of Relatively Human investigates the "Cramér-Rao bound"—a universal speed limit on knowledge—and Chentsov’s proof that Fisher information is the unique metric of probability space. We then explore the leading theories explaining this mystery: Roy Frieden’s controversial proposal that information generates physics, and the Dimensional Scaling framework’s conjecture that Fisher information measures the effective dimensionality of our world. Join us as we hunt for Fisher’s ghost in the machine of reality.