dreamdancer 0 #1 September 21, 2009 quantum news... QuoteQuantum weirdness could soon invade the living world, if a scheme to give a flu virus a strange double life comes off. In quantum theory, a single object can be doing two different things at once. This so-called "superposition" is a delicate state, destroyed by any contact with the outside world. The largest objects that have been superposed so far are molecules. It is hard to put a much larger object such as a cat or human into a superposition because air molecules and photons are always bouncing off it. But it might be possible with a small life form, according to Oriol Romero-Isart of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and his colleagues. They hope to prove the concept with the flu virus, which exhibits some properties of life, because it can survive in a vacuum – solving the problem of pesky air molecules. Their scheme would use two laser beams, whose light exerts a gentle force on matter. Where the two beams cross they form an "optical cavity" holding the virus in place. By adjusting the frequency of the beams, the laser photons can be made to absorb the vibration energy of the trapped virus about its centre of mass until it is slowed to its lowest possible energy state. In this "ground state" the virus is ready to go into a superposition. Sending a laser photon towards the trap should do the trick. Since a photon is a quantum entity it has more than one option open to it. Thus it will be both reflected and transmitted at the trap, putting it into a superposition. By impinging on the virus, it forces it into a superposition of both its ground state and next vibrational energy state. Now the virus should be doing two different things at once – the equivalent of you simultaneously mowing the lawn and doing the shopping. "They have come up with a really neat experiment – inventive and I think feasible," says Peter Knight of Imperial College London. Romero-Isart and his colleagues speculate that they could pull off the same feat with a tardigrade, or water bear, an animal less than a millimetre in size that can survive extreme temperatures and a vacuum for several days. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17792-could-we-create-quantum-creatures-in-the-lab.htmlstay away from moving propellers - they bite blue skies from thai sky adventures good solid response-provoking keyboarding Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Skyrad 0 #2 September 21, 2009 InterestingWhen an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy. Lucius Annaeus Seneca Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
kallend 2,150 #3 September 21, 2009 Quotequantum news... ***Quantum weirdness could soon invade the living world, if a scheme to give a flu virus a strange double life comes off. It's not wierd, it's just differently normal.... The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
riddler 0 #4 September 22, 2009 QuoteIt's not wierd, it's just differently normal. This is quantum science here, so it's weird, odd, strange, and perfectly normal, all at the same time.Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
dreamdancer 0 #5 September 22, 2009 bit more... QuoteWHATEVER happened to quantum computers? A few years ago, it seemed, it was just a case of a tweak here, a fiddle there, and some kind of number-crunching Godzilla would be unleashed upon us. Just as digital processors changed our lives in ways hard to imagine a few decades ago, the monstrous information processing power of individual atoms and electrons would mean that computing - and the world - would never be the same again. We're still waiting. In 2007, a Canadian company called D-Wave unveiled what it claimed was a quantum computer that could solve a sudoku puzzle, but there remains deep scepticism whether it is truly a quantum computer. Meanwhile, we seem stuck with the conventional, "classical" computers that rattle and purr away on our desks, toggling currents of electrons in billions of silicon transistors to produce the numbers, words and images that frame our lives. Paradise lost? No - merely postponed. Progress might have been slower than many quantum evangelists were predicting a decade or so ago, but after a quiet few years quantum computing is back with a vengeance. "The rate of progress has been dramatic," says David Wineland, a quantum-computing specialist at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado. The stage is now set, he and others claim, for the quantum computer to change our lives in the 21st century just as radically as its classical, digital counterpart did in the 20th. The premise behind a quantum computer is simple - provided you swallow the unpalatable quantum truths that underlie it. One is that objects such as atoms and electrons are not confined to being either this or that, as the objects of our everyday macroscopic world are; they can be both this and that at the same time. They might, for instance, be spinning clockwise and anticlockwise simultaneously, or adopt two different energy states at once. This is known as superposition. What's more, these ambiguous quantum characters can club together so that what you do to one affects the others. This is the phenomenon of entanglement or, if you're Einstein, "spooky action at a distance". Together, the characteristics of superposition and entanglement make for a computer of awesome power. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327262.500-quantum-computers-are-coming--just-dont-ask-when.htmlstay away from moving propellers - they bite blue skies from thai sky adventures good solid response-provoking keyboarding Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
