Friday 23 November 2007

Schrödinger's kittens enter the classical world

Watch closely enough, and a compass needle might occasionally jump instantaneously between directions.

Theory shows how quantum weirdness could still be seen on a large scale.

The particles that make up the world obey the rules of quantum theory, allowing them to do counterintuitive things such as being in several different places or states at once, so why don’t we see this sort of bizarre behaviour in the world around us? The explanation commonly offered in physics textbooks is that quantum effects apply only at very small scales, and get smoothed away at the everyday scales we can perceive.

But that’s not necessarily so, say two physicists in Austria. They claim that we’d be experiencing quantum weirdness all the time — balls that don’t follow definite paths, say, or objects 'tunnelling' out of sealed containers — if only we had sharper powers of perception.

Click here for Nature News Article

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I can’t help thinking there is design in the world we live in. If there is no chaos, and therefore stability, in the world we observe around us at our level, and chaos at sub-atomic level, then I believe it is because it has been designed to be that way. We can make excuses for the fact that we should be observing chaos and randomness but I think it is far more exciting and realistic to think that this stability at our level has been designed for us. We take nature and this wonderful world for granted but we should be in awe of it instead.
Yes everything should be chaos - just like subatomic level. But imagine the power involved in creating and holding the state we live in.

Brendan said...

These guys are saying there is chaos in the macro but we don't have the capability to notice it. Maybe we are the ones controlling the chaos just by perceiving it in a certain way with certain belief systems?

Unknown said...

Yes I know, but how can, and why would we be seeing different to what is really there?
Unless it is all an illusionary hologram. To be what we want it to be.
That would mean we are all linked as one, and the sum of all of us create the one world we live in.
Although I don't agree with the cat theory that if we can't see it we can't be certain its not there or dead or alive. Cats like all living things are fellow spirits and are experiencing and helping to create the same illusion. They are not objects that can be used as props. If the experiment involved putting a tin of baked beans in a container then maybe. Although many ancient civilizations imagined all elements to have spirit. So even the tin of baked beans will have a soul.
The world is strange. I cant help but feel we are evolving though. We are questioning our very own existence and it is a very odd time we live in. There has to be a purpose for this. I was however depressed when I followed your link to the truths of the Middle East war. There are tragedies going on all the time but life is cheap it would appear. Woman just seem to be producing more children to feed the economy - how odd is that? Neo in the energy pod at the beginning of the Matrix springs to mind. We are a virus out of control. And like all viruses we eventually begin to die out, but some will mutate. I hope I mutate -lol