Submitted via IRC for Fnord666
Researchers have studied how a 'drumstick' made of light could make a microscopic 'drum' vibrate and stand still at the same time.
A team of researchers from the UK and Australia have made a key step towards understanding the boundary between the quantum world and our everyday classical world.
Quantum mechanics is truly weird. Objects can behave like both particles and waves, and can be both here and there at the same time, defying our common sense. Such counterintuitive behaviour is typically confined to the microscopic realm and the question "why don't we see such behaviour in everyday objects?" challenges many scientists today.
Now, a team of researchers have developed a new technique to generate this type of quantum behaviour in the motion of a tiny drum just visible to the naked eye. The details of their research are published today in New Journal of Physics.
Project principal investigator, Dr Michael Vanner from the Quantum Measurement Lab at Imperial College London, said: "Such systems offer significant potential for the development of powerful new quantum-enhanced technologies, such as ultra-precise sensors, and new types of transducers.
[...] In the quantum world, a drum can vibrate and stand still at the same time. However, generating such quantum motion is very challenging. lead author of the project Dr Martin Ringbauer from the University of Queensland node of the Australian Research Council Centre for Engineered Quantum Systems, said: "You need a special kind of drumstick to make such a quantum vibration with our tiny drum."
In recent years, the emerging field of quantum optomechanics has made great progress towards the goal of a quantum drum using laser light as a type of drumstick. However, many challenges remain, so the authors' present study takes an unconventional approach.
Source: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/186346/can-quantum-drum-vibrate-stand-still/
Generation of Mechanical Interference Fringes by Multi-Photon Counting‘’ by M Ringbauer, T J Weinhold, L A Howard, A G White & M R Vanner is published in New Journal of Physics 20, 053042 (2018)
(Score: 4, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday May 21 2018, @11:26AM
While this is kind of nifty, it's still not as impressive as the drummer for Def Leppard working his shit manually with only one arm.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Monday May 21 2018, @11:35AM
Short answer:
No.
Long answer:
NOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @12:18PM (7 children)
When did physics become all about coming up with weird counterintuitive stuff instead of explaining the world around us as simply as possible? Seems like something has gone wrong when all we hear about is quantum crap, black holes brighter than galaxies, dark matter spheroids, dark energy, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @12:28PM
And whenever there does seem to be something interesting it just gets chalked up to coincidence these days. Eg titius bode law, temperature in venus atmosphere can be predicted from insolation and pressure, etc. Its like theyve given up on reality and instead focus on angels dancing on a pin type stuff.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @12:45PM
They are just marching to the beat of their own barely visible drum that's all.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ledow on Monday May 21 2018, @01:06PM (3 children)
Because... the world around you is counter-intuitive and isn't simple? It's arrogance to assume you can understand even the tiniest thing about an ENTIRE PLANET using only a couple of pounds of squidgy grey stuff in your head with just what your teachers can tell you in simple ways that you'll remember.
And do you know how quantum stuff and general relativity was found?
The cleverest people on the planet (I'll include Einstein because you'll know that name, but many others too) sat down, took the maths behind the world that we see (Newtonian laws, etc.) and applied it to other parts of the world. Everything from the tiniest (quantum) to the largest (cosmology).
It threw out a mess of crap and everyone went "Well, that can't be right!" and then spent the next 100 years working out that... actually... it is right. Simple maths, simple rules, applied to simple situations ends up in a mess of crap that took people 20 years to even SOLVE once, let alone realise the implications of. And despite it throwing up everything from space bending, to time running slower, to particles that pop in and out of existence, to things being more than one thing at the same time (wave-particle dualities, etc.), it was ALL proven to actually occur in nature like that. You could never have observed the world and then understood it by going the other way round.
So, it's all just made-up nonsense with no practical application, right? Not quite. If we had no understanding of quantum physics, your computer chip wouldn't be anywhere near as fast or as small (literally, you have to compensate for quantum effects or your chip will fail past a certain point). If we had no understanding of relativity, your satnav would be so inaccurate as to be useless (literally, you have to compensate for relativistic effects in your devices or GPS would be so far off it would be unusable - they actually put a software switch on the first GPS satellites to turn the "relativity equations" on and off, because they didn't believe Einstein... but when they are off, nothing works).
Past a point, the world is no longer "science introductory class" simple. Light acts like both a particle and a wave. It's literally an experiment that 10-15 year olds do in their science lessons.
And if you add up all the mass of the galaxy that you can see, none of the equations tally. We should either be collapsing into ourselves very rapidly or being flung out of it entirely. But we're not. Because somewhere there's a ton of mass that we can't account for.
Applying your 10-year-old-science-student knowledge to the world ends up in contradictions everywhere you look. The universe just isn't that simple. Hence the need to discover, study and understand things a bit beyond "If you push it, it'll move".
If anything, science like the wave-particle duality and quantum effects basically mean "we don't understand something fundamental". Our thinking of waves and particles is inherently wrong. There's another type of these things that may explain both waves and particles at the same time, while not actually being as simple as either. And who knows what else is possible once you start to understand that underlying concept? Hence you get things like Higgs fields, and all kinds of others stuff, trying to find out why even something as simple as a wave or a particle can actually be something else entirely, but we're not able to look at it correctly outside the bounds of the world we know and touch.
The world you touch is pretty well documented, defined, and there are no surprises. Hell, we can simulate the Newtonian physics world on a computer if we had one big enough - that's how all your games work. It's a solved problem, for the most part. Nothing deviates from the equations, it's just a matter of having enough data to be able to describe the situation well enough to tell you what's going to happen. But if you did that, you'd find that it wouldn't work exactly as the real world because of tiny, tiny, tiny quantum effects, and things like particles coming from the other side of the galaxy. Newtonian physics is "incomplete" and doesn't see them, and so doesn't describe them, and so ends up not being very useful.
But go small, large, or look at anything else and things get very weird, unknown and for the most part unsimulatable. So many billions of neutrinos are zipping through your body right this instant. In large-scale terms, they make almost no discernible difference. But to anything that matters and is on the right scale, they can make a whole mess of your experiments if you ignore them.
In answer to your question, physics started being about weird counter-intuitive stuff in about 1910-1920. When we did the maths and discovered all this other stuff. Einstein is famous for a reason. "100 years ago" is your answer. i.e. your great-great-great-grandfather's time. By contrast, Newtonian physics is, what? 400+ years old? We pretty much have that described, but people can't understand the simplest concepts of quantum physics despite being able to demonstrate them in a primary school lesson for the last 100 years. Catch up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @03:07PM
The higgs field was come up with as a way to avoid calculating negative probabilities. I think they should get rid of the higgs and allow the negative probabilities, its no weirder than the rest.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @05:20PM
Modded insightful, but what I really wanted was a "futile" mod -- because the audience that needs to read this probably isn't going to read your rational explanation.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday May 21 2018, @05:57PM
You overstate the certainty of "mass" in dark matter. It *may* be mass, or it may be something we haven't figured out about the equations, or it may be something non-particulate that interacts with gravity, or it may be something I haven't guessed at.
It's true that all the possible choices are pretty weird, but that doesn't make any particular one of them correct. E.g., if it's black holes, they need to be primordial black holes, as in "created before the creation of primordial Helium", or they'll change the primordial Lithium balance. And it that case, is there any matter inside them, or are they just photons forced so close together that they're gravitationally bound?
So while the thing that we call "dark matter" is real, it's not at all clear that it's matter, and it's dark only in the sense that it's transparent, i.e. doesn't significantly interact with EM radiation.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @02:02AM
The writers don't understand it very well (at all) and rely on tired, counter-factual explanations.
Wave-particle duality? Not much of a thing. Fields are supreme, particles are a wave phenomenon. Even sound waves do this, high frequencies bounce around like bullets while low frequencies slosh around more (as with light)—relative to the size of the features encountered. Spectral sound diffusers and light diffraction gratings work on the same principle, the former is just way bigger than the latter.
Superposition describes waves, when applied to particles you get weird language like them being in multiple places at once. You'll never find a particle in more than one place when measured, but you can infer things about the shape of the waves in the field, which, being waves, spread out and have peaks and troughs.
This is all very simplified but I hope you get the idea. There's a few 3b1b videos I'd recommend:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzRCDLre1b4 [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBnnXbOM5S4 [youtube.com]
There's lots more out there that explains stuff legitimately. The important thing about 3b1b and friends is that they don't try to explain things they don't understand, or even things they do understand but can't communicate. They're educated people trying to educate, rather than a reporter trying to sell rags or clicks or books. So you get the real explanation and the intuitions used by the people who understand the material.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday May 21 2018, @01:53PM
Meh, Quadropole [soylentnews.org] have been simultaneously using / not using one of these drums since their fifth album "Schroedinger's Fridge", which was both released to critical acclaim and never released at all back in 2001.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @05:53PM
I feel sorry for the poor lab cat who will be testing this...or not testing.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday May 21 2018, @06:48PM
Is the drumstick deep fried or baked?