Mal12345
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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=quantum-microphone
Before someone here bashes Scientific American for being only slightly above Omni magazine, versions of this article have appeared in highly reputable sources.
'Physicists have long known that, following the laws of quantum mechanics, objects at the scale of atoms or smaller can exist in multiple simultaneous states. For example, a single electron can move along multiple different paths or an atom can be placed in two different places, simultaneously. This so-called superposition of states should in principle apply to larger objects, as well, as in the proverbial thought experiment in which a cat is simultaneously dead and alive. And in recent years various teams have shown that the weird phenomenon does occur among objects as big as molecules, and also in truly macroscopic systems such as electrical currents in superconductors.
In the new experiment Aaron O'Connell, a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his co-workers have shown for the first time that larger objects can also be in two places at once. "It tells us that quantum mechanics works for macroscopic objects in space," says O'Connell, who presented the results here at a meeting of the American Physical Society. The results were also published online Wednesday in Nature.'
Before someone here bashes Scientific American for being only slightly above Omni magazine, versions of this article have appeared in highly reputable sources.
'Physicists have long known that, following the laws of quantum mechanics, objects at the scale of atoms or smaller can exist in multiple simultaneous states. For example, a single electron can move along multiple different paths or an atom can be placed in two different places, simultaneously. This so-called superposition of states should in principle apply to larger objects, as well, as in the proverbial thought experiment in which a cat is simultaneously dead and alive. And in recent years various teams have shown that the weird phenomenon does occur among objects as big as molecules, and also in truly macroscopic systems such as electrical currents in superconductors.
In the new experiment Aaron O'Connell, a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his co-workers have shown for the first time that larger objects can also be in two places at once. "It tells us that quantum mechanics works for macroscopic objects in space," says O'Connell, who presented the results here at a meeting of the American Physical Society. The results were also published online Wednesday in Nature.'