tell me a story about quantum theory

From Scientific American: Was Einstein Wrong?: A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity

I've heard how there is something about quantum theory that violates Einstein's theory of relativity, but I didn't know that at least part of that is non-locality. I should have, considering my fascination with quantum entanglement. Anyway, this article details the history of the contradictions between these two theories. Being very lay-person and also very ill, it took me a long time to read it, but it's definitely very interesting.

entangled quantumly

From Scientific American: Quantum Entanglement Benefits Exist after Links Are Broken, Quantum Leap: Information Teleported between Ions at a Distance

Two really interesting articles on quantum entanglement. According to wikipedia, quantum entanglement is "a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which the quantum states of two or more objects are linked together so that one object can no longer be adequately described without full mention of its counterpart — even though the individual objects may be spatially separated."

In the first article, Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at MIT, discovers that there is some sort of lingering connection between particles even after they've disentangled. By applying this, he developed the idea of quantum illumination, where something (a camera, satellite, x-ray machine, whatever), could entangle photons and send one set to the object being sensed, with the other set being used for reference, so that when the returning photons bring information back, any noise created by any unrelated photons could be filtered out. And, "[i]f quantum illumination works, Lloyd suggests it could boost the sensitivity of radar and x-ray systems as well as optical telecommunications and microscopy by a millionfold or more."

The second article describes how researchers, led by Stephen Olmschenk, a grad student at UMD College Park, "succeeded in teleporting quantum information between ytterbium ions (charged atoms) three feet (one meter) apart." The article describes the process:

Information is teleported from one ion to another by encoding quantum information onto the first ion. Once the ion is entangled with another, the state of each ion is indefinite until the first one is measured—an action that projects the other ion into one of two states. Conventional (nonquantum) communication channels relay information, gleaned from the first ion's measurement, as to which of those two states is correct, and a pulse of microwave energy sets the second ion into the state representing the information encoded on the first.

What peaked my interest about this (besides it being awesomely cool) was a couple of sci-fi books I read a few years ago, Metaplanetary (2001) and Superluminal (2004) by Tony Daniel, which are set in the future where quantum communication is the basis for society and technology. Great books. Anyway, the thought of actually applying quantum entanglement and communication to real technology is awesome. We will never know everything.

quantum hindsight got contacts

From ScienceDaily: Physicists Resolve Confounding Paradox Of Quantum Theory

Science is fun, especially quantum theory (nice I'm saying that when I really don't understand it, huh?). One of the things early quantum physicists discovered is that observing particles move changes how they act. (Check out this awesome video describing the "double slit experiment" performed in the 1920s. It's very easy to understand and features a superhero scientist. Sweet.)

So, according to this article, in the '90s people started thinking they could measure particles without interacting with them, "[b]ut when Lucien Hardy proposed that one could never reliably make inferences about past events which hadn't been directly observed, a paradox emerged which suggested that whenever one attempted to reason about the past in this way they would be led into error." So hindsight is blind?

However, scientists at the University of Toronto combined the ideas of "interaction-free measurement" with something call weak measurement, "a tool whereby the presence of a detector is less than the level of uncertainty around what is being measured, so that there is an imperceptible impact on the experiment."

I have to say, I don't understand the specifics. (I really need to take some college-level physics.) But, it basically sounds to me like scientists will now be able to see what particles are doing when they're supposed to be acting like matter but are pretending to be energy. And then for the why. Then maybe the why of particles getting stage fright?

real live levitation!

From ScienceDaily: Levitation At Microscopic Scale Could Lead To Nanomechanical Devices Based On Quantum Levitation

Scientists at Harvard have discovered that by applying the Casimir effect, they could get a metal plate to float a microscopic distance off another type of metal plate.

Scientific levitation. Based on quantum mechanics. The world gets more and more exciting. These types of experimentation and discoveries are why I don't think that science and spirituality are opposed. I just think that some things are too big for us to understand, sort of like a bacteria trying to understand the known universe or the solar system. Though hey... maybe bacteria are extremely philosophical. I really don't know. I haven't talked to my bacteria lately. Just like "true" reality, reality as a whole, god or whatever you want to call it, hasn't talked to me lately, either.