Nature.com reports on an article that put us in to a state of flux with a curious mention of Schrodinger’s cat.
Article as follows:
A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.
Andrew Cleland at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his team cooled a tiny metal paddle until it reached its quantum mechanical ‘ground state’ — the lowest-energy state permitted by quantum mechanics. They then used the weird rules of quantum mechanics to simultaneously set the paddle moving while leaving it standing still. The experiment shows that the principles of quantum mechanics can apply to everyday objects as well as as atomic-scale particles.
The work is simultaneously being published online today in Nature and presented today at the American Physical Society’s meeting in Portland, Oregon.
According to quantum theory, particles act as waves rather than point masses on very small scales. This has dozens of bizarre consequences: it is impossible to know a particle’s exact position and velocity through space, yet it is possible for the same particle to be doing two contradictory things simultaneously. Through a phenomenon known as ‘superposition’ a particle can be moving and stationary at the same time — at least until an outside force acts on it. Then it instantly chooses one of the two contradictory positions.
Full article at Nature.com
http://strangetrue.blogspot.com/2005/05/psi-captured-on-eeg-research-of-jacobo.html
This link seems not to link to the article, only if you will try to understand what they write .. and follow up on that ..
Energy .. my opinion .. waves or particles (it’s all the same .. ) goes there where a demand is for it ..
Nothing .. Everything .. at the same time .. in the same spot .. another way of seeing upon it.
link please! how big is this ‘paddle’?
Intriguing, but I couldn’t access the full article, as they charge for it. The quoted part says that the paddle is put into a ‘mixed quantum state of moving and not moving’. If that is an accurate description, then it is very different from a ‘pure’ quantum state such as the one in which Schroedinger’s infamous cat is supposed to be. A ‘mixed state’, on the other hand, is easy to achieve: if I rattle a dice in a box without looking at it, it’s in a mixed state, because I don’t know which face is up. Putting any macroscopic object into a pure quantum state of ‘moving and not moving’ should be practically impossible because it would have to be completely isolated from its environment. Interactions with the environment would produce a ‘mixed state’, through ‘decoherence’.
P.S. I love the cartoon.
Quantum mechanics is the description of physics at the scale of atoms, and the even smaller scales of fundamental particles.