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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)."
Oh please. They're self-replicators in the domain of organic chemicals. They take resources from their environment (i.e. DNA), effectively use those resources for self-replication, and manage to do this with just enough random noise for adaptive mutation to occur.
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That's more than I can say of certain slashdotters living in their mother's basements. Are you saying that they're not alive?
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Let the debate begin!
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I don't think there's much of a debate. It's common consensus that virii sit on the border being alive. They have most of the traits of what is usually defined as being alive, but they don't have all of them. The technicalities aren't terribly important in any context, including the philosophical one, so nobody really bothers.
I could be wrong, but I think the point of the experiment is to learn where and how quantum aspects interface with macro-objects. A virus is much larger than a photon, for example. If they can reproduce "delayed choice" and "quantum eraser" type effects on a virus, then that would really be something.
It's not a test to see whether something is alive or dead. It's a test to understand if and/or how "which-path" observations collapse the wavefunction for macro-objects,
IANAP, so please enlighten me if I missed the point.
The question of whether viruses are living things is far from clear-cut.
The question of whether viruses are alive or not is as interesting a question as whether submarines swim. (To steal a phrase for Dijkstra).
We know what viruses do and don't do. Arguing about whether they're "alive" or not is purely semantics and is not a scientific question at all.
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