First quantum effects seen in visible object

[dreamdancer 0]

i'm here. no, i'm not. i'm here. no, i'm not...

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Does Schrödinger's cat really exist? You bet. The first ever quantum superposition in an object visible to the naked eye has been observed.

Aaron O'Connell and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, did not actually produce a cat that was dead and alive at the same time, as Erwin Schrödinger proposed in a notorious thought experiment 75 years ago. But they did show that a tiny resonating strip of metal – only 60 micrometres long, but big enough to be seen without a microscope – can both oscillate and not oscillate at the same time. Alas, you couldn't actually see the effect happening, because that very act of observation would take it out of superposition.

"We talk about quantum weirdness and things being in two places at once, but it all involves atoms and molecules, stuff we don't normally interact with," says O'Connell, who presented the results at the March meeting of the American Physical Society in Portland, Oregon, today.

Proving that all objects, whatever their size, obeys the same rules has long been a goal of physicists. But with quantum mechanics it is no trivial matter: the larger an object, the more easily its fragile quantum state is destroyed by the disruptive influence of the world around it. O'Connell's experiments required delicate control and a temperature of just 25 millikelvin to measure the state in the few nanoseconds before it was broken down by disruptive influences from outside.

"It was a close call, but sufficient to see a first quantum signature," says Markus Aspelmeyer of the University of Vienna, Austria, who was not involved in the research.

The key was to connect the resonating strip to a superconducting qubit – a tiny electric circuit that can easily be prepared in a quantum superposition of two energy states. "The qubit acts as a bridge between the microscopic and the macroscopic worlds," says O'Connell. By tuning the frequency at which the qubit cycled between its two states to match the resonant frequency of the metallic strip, the qubit's quantum state could be transferred to the resonator at will.

When measured afterwards, the resonator was sometimes in its non-oscillating ground state and sometimes in an oscillating "excited" state. The number of times it was measured to be in each state followed the probabilistic rules of quantum mechanics.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18669-first-quantum-effects-seen-in-visible-object.html

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[longtall 0]

WHEW ! I think I have a headache,no I dont.I do,(not).

" 90 right, five miles then cut."---Pukin Buzzards

[Andy9o8 2]

I've already had plenty of experience with a quantum singularity. It's called my daughter's bank account.

[jtval 0]

If I read this correctly they are saying that but spinning a (rectangular) strip of metal it can spin so fast that you can see it moving....

and that's a break through?
Anytime you look at the car next to you you have a chgance of seeing the wheels stand still. That's quantum driving.

I'm sure I am missing the point. If someone can break it down maybe I'll be amazed.

But by resonating the object it causes it to spin.
It spun so fast you couldn't observe it moving at all, right?

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[BikerBabe 0]

Oh my goodness, a chance to share one of my absolute all-time favorite poems! i shall let someone more lyrical than I explain:

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Schrödinger, Erwin! Professor of physics!
Wrote daring equations! Confounded his critics!
(Not bad, eh? Don't worry. This part of the verse
Starts off pretty good, but it gets a lot worse.)
Win saw that the theory that Newton'd invented
By Einstein's discov'ries had been badly dented.
"What now?" wailed his colleagues. Said Erwin, "Don't panic,
No grease monkey I, but a Quantum mechanic.
Consider electrons. Now these teeny articles
Are sometimes like waves, and then sometimes like particles.

"If that's not confusing, the nuclear dance
Of electrons and suchlike is governed by chance!
No sweat though - my theory permits us to judge
Where some of 'em is and the rest of them was."
Not everyone bought this, it threatened to wreck
The comforting linkage of cause and effect.
E'en Einstein had doubts, and so Schrödinger tried
To tell him what quantum mechanics implied.
Said Win to Al, "Brother, suppose we've a cat,
And inside a tube we have put that cat at -

"Along with a solitare deck and some Fritos,
A bottle of Night Train, a couple mosquitoes
(Or something else rhyming) and, oh, if you got 'em,
One vial prussic acid, one decaying ottom
Or attom - whatever - but when it emits,
A trigger device blasts the vial into bits
Which snuffs our poor kitty. The odds of this crime
Are 50 to 50 per hour each time.
The cylinder's sealed. The hour's passed away. Is
Our pussy still purring - or pushing up daisies?

"Now, YOU'd say the cat either lives or it don't
But quantum mechanics is stubborn and won't.
Statistically speaking, the cat (goes the joke),
Is half a cat breathing and half a cat croaked.
To some this may seem a ridiculous split,
But quantum mechanics must answer, 'Tough shit.
We may not know much, but one thing's fo'sho':
There's things in the cosmos that we cannot know.
Shine light on electrons - You'll cause them to swerve.
The act of observing disturbs the observed -

Which ruins your test. But then if there's no testing
To see if a particle's moving or resting
Why try to conjecture? Pure useless endeavor!
We know probability - certainty, never.'
The effect of this notion? I very much fear
'Twill make doubtful all things that were formerly clear.
Till soon the cat doctors will say in reports,
'We've just flipped a coin and we've learned he's a corpse.'"

So said Herr Erwin. Quoth Albert, "Your're nuts.
God doesn't play dice with the universe, putz.
I'll prove it!" he said, and the Lord knows he tried -
In vain - until fin'ly he more or less died.
Win spoke at the funeral: "Listen, dear friends,
Sweet Al was my buddy. I must make amends.
Though he doubted my theory, I'll say this of the saint:
Ten-to-one he's in heaven - but five bucks says he ain't."

- Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope

basically, probability rules all, and at any given time the cat is 50% alive AND 50% dead...except that observing the result actually *changes* the result.

Never meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup!

[kallend 2,150]

It's been done before. We've all seen rushmc holding two contradictory opinions at the same time.

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The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[champu 1]

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Anytime you look at the car next to you you have a chgance of seeing the wheels stand still. That's quantum driving.

I'm sure I am missing the point. If someone can break it down maybe I'll be amazed.

What you're observing when rotating wheels appear to be standing still, moving backwards, or moving forwards at the "wrong" speed is called temporal aliasing. When a repeating pattern (such as the rotating spokes of a wheel) is observed as sequential snapshots* it's possible for the time between snapshots to "sync up" with the time it takes the pattern to repeat. When this happens the wheel will appear to stand still. If you're not quite synced up one way or the other it will appear to rotate slowly forwards or backwards.

The reason the wheel appears to spin one way, then stop, then the other, then stop, etc. as the vehicle speeds up or slows down has to do with how many orientations of the wheel appear the same or in other words, how many spokes the wheel has. The more spokes, the greater the number of times this back and forth dance will happen.

The "oscillating" and "not oscillating" states described in the article are similar to the wheel situation in that they are an artifact of a shortcoming of the observer, but not the same shortcoming. If you simply imaged the rotating wheel at a faster frame rate you would see that it was spinning all along. With the metallic strip, it is actually in a superposition (fancy word for "a mix") of both states simultaneously.


* Note: You'll notice when you watch video or film of a car driving the effect is much more pronounced. This is because video and film have lower hysteresis than your optic nerve (they "reset" more completely between each observation) and they also have a fixed frame rate (your eyes don't make observations at exactly the same interval in all situations.)

[billvon 3,120]

>If I read this correctly they are saying that but spinning a (rectangular)
>strip of metal it can spin so fast that you can see it moving....

No, it's both vibrating and not vibrating at the same time.

>Anytime you look at the car next to you you have a chgance of seeing
>the wheels stand still.

More like - the car's wheels are both spinning and not spinning at the same time. It doesn't collapse into one state or the other until you observe it.

[Skyrad 0]

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I've already had plenty of experience with a quantum singularity. It's called my daughter's bank account.

LOL

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

[billvon 3,120]

>The reason the wheel appears to spin one way, then stop, then the other,
> then stop, etc. as the vehicle speeds up or slows down has to do with how
> many orientations of the wheel appear the same or in other words, how
> many spokes the wheel has.

It also has to do with the frequency of the light illuminating it or the speed of the occluding object passing over it. In regular sunlight, with a clear view of a spinning object, you don't get that "wheel standing still" effect.

[quade 4]

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More like - the car's wheels are both spinning and not spinning at the same time. It doesn't collapse into one state or the other until you observe it.

I have a problem with the analogy, but maybe that also points out a problem with observing the strip of metal.

If I spin a wheel, I can make it appear to be spinning or not via observation simply based on the amount of time I look at it. Flash a strobe light and I can make it appear to stop although it's not stopped at all.

I can also make it appear as if the wheel is stopped by taking a very short photographic exposure of it.

Is it possible that something similar is happening with the strip of metal in the experiment?

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[Belgian_Draft 0]

You know you're a geek when you have been arrested for actually trying the Schrödinger's cat experiment using a real live cat.

Most men, whether they know it or not, have a lot of experience with things being in two states at the the same time. After all, it is how a woman's mind works and how they communicate with men.

Ok, now I really am moving to Peru....

HAMMER:
Originally employed as a weapon of war, the hammer nowadays is used as a
kind of divining rod to locate the most expensive parts adjacent the
object we are trying to hit.

[dreamdancer 0]

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More like - the car's wheels are both spinning and not spinning at the same time. It doesn't collapse into one state or the other until you observe it.

I have a problem with the analogy, but maybe that also points out a problem with observing the strip of metal.

If I spin a wheel, I can make it appear to be spinning or not via observation simply based on the amount of time I look at it. Flash a strobe light and I can make it appear to stop although it's not stopped at all.

I can also make it appear as if the wheel is stopped by taking a very short photographic exposure of it.

Is it possible that something similar is happening with the strip of metal in the experiment?

if they got the experiment right then the strip is oscillating and not oscillating at the same time. my interpretation of this is that in one reality the strip is oscillating and in another it isn't oscillating. what the entangled qubit does is connect these two realities (of the multiverse) together so that the strip is in both states. the moment the strip is observed (by us) the strip collapses into either oscillating/not oscillating 'unconnecting' the two realities
(i think)

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[Iceburner 0]

i will admit that being a crim major in college something about physics caught my attention (had to take 2 semesters of it for a scholarship)...and i ended up taking 7 semesters of it. quantum physics always blew my mind...i love it. There are some other crazy experiments out there if you search hard enough for them or get the "geek" magazines. Cant wait to hear more about this one! (yes, i am that much of a nerd)

[pirana 0]

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WHEW ! I think I have a headache,no I dont.I do,(not).

Headache removal medicine:

Alice In Quantumland by Robert Gilmore.

Best layman's read I've found on the topic.

Also, Where Does The Weirdness Go? by David Lindley.

Either book breaks it down for us non-physicists; and provides a certain comfort by way of explaining why there is no danger our cats may be dead when we are not looking. Extrapolation to the scale of things like cats, cars, the family jewels, etc makes for fun thought experiments; but the number of possible states for things that large are so smoothed out on our scale that they can be ignored.

p.s. - The subtitle of Lindley's book, Why Quantum Mechanics Is Strange, But Not As Strange As You Think; says a lot.

" . . . the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

[kallend 2,150]

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WHEW ! I think I have a headache,no I dont.I do,(not).

Headache removal medicine:

Alice In Quantumland by Robert Gilmore.

Best layman's read I've found on the topic.

Also, Where Does The Weirdness Go? by David Lindley.

Either book breaks it down for us non-physicists; and provides a certain comfort by way of explaining why there is no danger our cats may be dead when we are not looking. Extrapolation to the scale of things like cats, cars, the family jewels, etc makes for fun thought experiments; but the number of possible states for things that large are so smoothed out on our scale that they can be ignored.

p.s. - The subtitle of Lindley's book, Why Quantum Mechanics Is Strange, But Not As Strange As You Think; says a lot.

It is and isn't strange at the same time. And I disagree with the statement that at our scale quantum effects are smoothed out and can be ignored; the behavior of, for example, a superconductor is clearly apparent at our scale ( I did the levitation demo in my class just this week), and is definitely a quantum effect. For that matter, refrigerator magnets are a visible manifestation of a quantum effect.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.