vilhelm_s
vilhelm_s t1_j7algoz wrote
Reply to comment by Tricky-Block4385 in A medical isotope made from nuclear weapons waste (Tc-99m) has a six-hour half-life. How do hospitals keep it in stock? by Gwaiian
Roughly how long is the cutoff time? (E.g. if the courier is late by 1 hour?)
vilhelm_s t1_j51bk1j wrote
Reply to How is protein folding quantum mechanical? by prionprion
I think it's not extremely "quantum". Of course proteins are molecules so they ultimately obey quantum mechanics, but I think for the folding problem people are not really treating that---they just consider the parts of the chain as having well-defined positions in 3d-space, and add up energy from pairwise interactions between the parts that end up close to each others. (Finding the minimal energy configuration here is already very difficult, even before starting to consider any quantum superpositions or trying to compute the pairwise interactions more exactly).
However, some people hope that quantum computers could still be helpful, e.g. this recent paper. The problem they are solving is still the classical, non-quantum setup, but there are quantum algorithms that are supposed to be good at searching for minimal-energy configurations, so it may still speed things up.
vilhelm_s t1_j7gu3uh wrote
Reply to comment by Tricky-Block4385 in A medical isotope made from nuclear weapons waste (Tc-99m) has a six-hour half-life. How do hospitals keep it in stock? by Gwaiian
Yes, that makes sense, thank you!