Image Credit: NASA E/PO, Sonoma State
University, Aurore Simonnet
LEDs and semiconductors are possible because today's quantum theory accurately predicts their operation. Although it works, the most thoughtful of quantum theory researchers will remark that it is more than a little strange.
At the atomic level, physicists are accustomed to a probabilistic world. The position of an atom or electron is never known, and the simple act of observing, changes its position. One of the most bizarre quirks is that if two particles are separated and transported across opposite ends of the universe, observing one affects the other instantaneously - faster than light. Einstein called this and others, "spukehafte Fernwirkung", or spooky actions.
Although quantum mechanics predicts all of this, physicists simultaneously accept two different worlds. They view the physical world with Newtonian physics and the subatomic world with quantum theory. Although admittedly incomplete, this perspective has served physicists and the rest of us for six decades.
To quote Bob Dylan, "The times they are a-changin" - Team's quantum object is biggest by factor of billions explains scientists have created one of these spooky things large enough to see. The BBC article tells that researchers produced a resonator large enough to see with the naked eye. By cooling it down to within a cat's whisker of absolute zero, they inserted a quantum of electrical energy and observed that the resonator also had vibrational states in quanta, called phonons. Imagine pushing a child on a swing. Newtonian physics predicts that the trajectory is continuous - that you can forever divide the trajectory into smaller and smaller parts. But quantum theory implies that the trajectory is not continuous - there are discrete jumps. This resonator is the first time that quanta has been observed for anything larger than a molecule of 60 atoms.
Macro-Weirdness: "Quantum Microphone" Puts Naked-Eye Object in 2 Places at Once explains some spookiness was observed. The resonator was observed to be in two states at the same time. In The Spookiness That Bothered Einstein, I explain a simple light experiment that demonstrates it, but the objects in this classic experiment are photons. Now researchers have demonstrated that large objects can also be in two places at once. Perhaps this breakthrough will result in Star Trek "transporters".
At the least, it explains a phenomenon that has troubled parents ever since covered wagon days. One child in the back claims that the other touched her. He of course, denies it. Now we know they are both right.
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