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Creating a Quantum Superposition of Living Things
KentuckyFC writes "Having created quantum superpositions of photons, atoms, and even molecules, scientists are currently preparing to do the same for larger objects — namely viruses. The technique will involve storing a virus in a vacuum and then cooling it to its quantum-mechanical ground state in a microcavity. Zapping the virus with a laser then leaves it in a superposition of its ground state and an excited one. That's no easy task, however. The virus will have to survive the vacuum, behave like a dielectric, and appear transparent to the laser light, which would otherwise tear it apart. Now a group of researchers has worked out that several viruses look capable of surviving the superposition process, including the common flu virus and the tobacco mosaic virus. They point out that after creating the superposition, scientists will be able to perform the Schrodinger's Cat experiment for the first time, which should be fun (but less so for the virus)."
Viruses are not living things. They have no metabolism and need a host to reproduce. They're basically just packets of proteins containing DNA.
-- Cheers!
A lot of the researchers who work with viruses consider them to be alive. See for example this piece by Abbie Smith explaining why viruses should be considered to be alive and why most of the arguments against are not convincing: http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2009/03/ten_five_reasons_clumsy_excuse.php. The people who argue that viruses aren't alive are almost inevitably non-biologists or biologists who don't work with viruses.
If we pull a DNA strand out of a nucleus from one of your cells and put it on a plate, it is not a living thing. It remains true that if we put it back undamaged, it can then reproduce, but it's still just a DNA fragment.
If we are to say viruses are living things, it would imply that that DNA fragment is a living thing.
Also, we've been on a crusade recently to taxonomically reclassify everything based on its evolutionary history, now that our understanding of DNA enables us to determine this. Since viruses, being leftover DNA or RNA fragments from the breakup of expired bacteria for the most part, they don't have an evolutionary history per se. They don't fit into the taxonomic classes for living things anywhere. A severed or left-over part of a living being is not, in an of itself, a living being, no matter how it behaves when you reattach or reinsert it into one.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Another issue is that a cat can't be alive and dead, only one or the other. Just because YOU don't know which, doesn't mean that it doesn't, or that reality doesn't. [...]
Yes, that was once a common philosophical view of reality, but it's one that's flat out contradicted by observation. I'm ignoring the errors in the rest of your post since it all seems to follow from the above false statements.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."