Schrödinger's Virus

[bananas]

Schrödinger's virus and decoherence

The physics arXiv blog, Nature, Ethiopia, Softpedia, and many people on the Facebook were thrilled by a new preprint about the preparation of Schrödinger's virus, a small version of Schrödinger's cat.

The preprint is called

Towards quantum superposition of living organisms (click)

and it was written by Oriol Romero-Isart, Mathieu L. Juan, Romain Quidant, and J. Ignacio Cirac. They wrote down some basic stuff about the theory and a pretty clear recipe how to cool down the virus and how to manipulate with it (imagine a discussion of the usual "atomic physics" devices with microcavities, lasers, ground states, and excited states of a virus, and a purely technical selection of the most appropriate virus species).

It is easy to understand the excitement of many people. The picture is pretty and the idea is captivating. People often think that the living objects should be different than the "dull" objects studied by physics. People often think that living objects - and viruses may or may not be included in this category - shouldn't ever be described by superpositions of well-known "privileged" wave functions. Except that they can be and it is sometimes necessary. Quantum mechanics can be baffling but it's true.

<snip>

ah-ah-ah-choo!

[cliffordu]

1. Well....That's easy for you to say.....

[BlooInBloo]

2. I predict we all die from quantum pig flu.

[DCKit]

3. 'Cause hypochrondriacs didn't have enough reasons? n/t

[Indenturedebtor]

4. I've been on dates that were in superposition before

Simply need one more drink to force the desired outcome ;)

[Occulus]

5. BAD. Bad bad bad bad BAD.

:spank:

:rofl:

[BadgerKid]

6. Sounds like an ad for Eigenstate beer.

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