The Corporate Masters have launched a "featured blogger" program, asking individual ScienceBloggers to comment on news articles from the main site, and publishing the responses with the magazine piece. I just did one on new quantum experiments, which was posted today.
The news article is Supersizing Quantum Behavior by Veronique Greenwood. My piece is Reconciling an Ordinary World, which starts out:
One of the most vexing things about studying quantum mechanics is how maddeningly classical the world is. Quantum physics features all sorts of marvelous things--particles behaving like waves, objects in two places at the same time, cats that are both alive and dead--but we don't see those things in the world around us. When we look at an everyday object, we see it in a definite classical state and not in any of the strange combinations of states allowed by quantum mechanics. Particles and waves look completely different, dogs can only pass on one side or the other of an obstacle, and cats are stubbornly alive or dead, not both at once.
(That's more or less a direct lift from the opening of Chapter 3 of the book. Why mess with what works?)
If you want to read the rest, click through to the magazine. If you want to complain about how badly I misrepresented some technical point, you know where the comments are.
Physical Science
Comments
Approximations run the world, exactitude runs the world to our liking. All the profits are in the main text, all the fun is is in the footnotes.
Posted by: Uncle Al | July 29, 2009 11:16 AM
One of the main reasons we don't see quantum weirdness at the classical scale is that classical explanations were devised for what we see at a classical scale. "Quantum" (or relativistic) weirdness is what we didn't know we had to explain.
Classical EM is all about superposition and interference, and is pretty darn weird if you think about it. (It's also Lorentz invariant.) Cross two polarizers, then slide a third one in between at a 45 degree angle. That isn't weird? Project a red laser spot on a wall, then block it with the edge of a razor blade held at arm's length. You'll still be able to see the spot when it's covered by the edge of the razor. That's easily explained by diffraction. But it's still weird. Diffraction is weird.
And since the laser spot is made of photons, it's quantum weird. We just have a classical explanation, in addition to the quantum one.
Posted by: Bob Hawkins | July 30, 2009 4:30 PM