First, Zewail apparently has been pushing these ideas for some time, and Nature just gave him the opportunity to get it publicized a little. This is theory, people aren't going to go simultaneously calculate position and velocity of fundamental particles this afternoon, but he theorizes that with these two conditions met, such a characterization could be possible. As far as I understand, that is all he is claiming.
Second, when I said "he proposes in a recent issue of Nature...that one can solve, USING CLASSICAL PHYSICS (ie: f=ma)..." the (f=ma) is an EXAMPLE of what classical Newtonian physics is. I am not sure how that got misunderstood, but I apologize for my ambiguity. Perhaps it would have been better to simply quote Zewail as I will do now: "But if these waves are added up coherently with well-defined phases, the probability distribution becomes localized in space. The resultant wave packet and its associated de Broglie wavelength has the essential character of a classical particle: a trajectory in space and time with a well-defined (group) velocity and position - a moving classical marble but at atomic scale!" (Nature 2001, 412, p.279).
Even if my explanation was convoluted, I simply hope to get across Zewail's main idea: that quantum uncertainty is no longer an obstacle, and therefore openening the theoretical possibility for the resolution of HUP.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed some clarification is in need:
First, Zewail apparently has been pushing these ideas for some time, and Nature just gave him the opportunity to get it publicized a little. This is theory, people aren't going to go simultaneously calculate position and velocity of fundamental particles this afternoon, but he theorizes that with these two conditions met, such a characterization could be possible. As far as I understand, that is all he is claiming.
Second, when I said "he proposes in a recent issue of Nature...that one can solve, USING CLASSICAL PHYSICS (ie: f=ma)..." the (f=ma) is an EXAMPLE of what classical Newtonian physics is. I am not sure how that got misunderstood, but I apologize for my ambiguity. Perhaps it would have been better to simply quote Zewail as I will do now: "But if these waves are added up coherently with well-defined phases, the probability distribution becomes localized in space. The resultant wave packet and its associated de Broglie wavelength has the essential character of a classical particle: a trajectory in space and time with a well-defined (group) velocity and position - a moving classical marble but at atomic scale!" (Nature 2001, 412, p.279).
Even if my explanation was convoluted, I simply hope to get across Zewail's main idea: that quantum uncertainty is no longer an obstacle, and therefore openening the theoretical possibility for the resolution of HUP.