Slashdot Mirror
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)."
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.
The ASPCMOTMOMNBA?
You, sir, need to work on your organization names.
Let me suggest a few:
The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Questionable Under Examination To Zoological Life Characterization Organisms Almost This (.) Large.
The SPC-QUETZLCOATL is, of course, dedicated to the humane treatment of viruses, and should not be confused with the SPCQ, which is dedicated to the humane treatment of feathered-serpent redeemer/savior archetypal figures.
Also it should be noted that the (.) in the official name of the organization is a tiny dot in parentheses, not a ASCII boobie, no matter how much you'd like it to be one.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste the Slashdotters' stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it.
Since the collapse of the state vector is an illusion caused by the entanglement of the experimenter with the experiment, whereupon the experimenter (now in a superposition of states) can only measure one outcome, this recless creation of macromolecular superpositions will deplete the multiverse's supply of world-lines and immanentize the eschaton. We'll have doppelgangers racing madly through the streets, and it will all end in tears.
Seems no less reasonable than the wiki writeup on superposition. QM reads to me like high-brow White Zombie lyrics, just words rammed together with no inherent meaning. Stick a few "motherfuckers", "yeahs" and obscure movie quotes in there and I think we'd have it. I'm sure it makes sense to some people but I'd need a contact high to grok it.
THE DEAD HAVE COME BACK TO LIFE!The Hamiltonian gives the rate at which the particle has an amplitude to go from m to n. YEAH! The reason it is multiplied by i AMBIENT SCREAMING SOUNDSis that the condition that U is unitary translates to the condition: YEAH MOTHERFUCKER YEAH! which says that H is Hermitian. The eigenvalues of the Hermitian matrix H are real quantities which have a physical interpretation as energy levels. PSYCHOLOIC SLAG SUCKING JUICE FROM A FALLEN ANGEL If the factor i were absent, the H matrix would be antihermitian and would have purely imaginary eigenvalues, which is not the traditional way quantum mechanics represents observable quantities like the energy.INSANE CLOWN LAUGHTER
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Virii is not a word. The plural is 'viruses.'
If that's true, then what are infecting my boxen?
Oh? Just the other day, we were talking about how much cell division is like fork(): it's not just the pure code that's forked, but the state of all globals and open file descriptors, too. There's more to reproduction than just our DNA, there's all that "running VM" stuff going on, too: an infected cell that reproduces is likely to result in two infected cells, even if that's not part of the cell's normal DNA; a cell with a chemical imbalance will likely pass that on to its new sibling. Some cloning methods rely on injecting one cell's DNA into another -- like running a program in both a test and production environment, care should be taken to think about the whole situation when diagnosing problems, not just the DNA/code itself. See? More similarities.
Comparing & contrasting (via "like") is not the same as saying the two are the same (via "equals"). Commonalities, when they can be found, are informative because (most) humans have the power of inductive reasoning. You're welcome to point out the important differences so we can avoid coming to undue conclusions in one or the other field.
You know what else is common consensus? The plural of "virus" is "viruses".