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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

A pair of physicists, one with Tsinghua University in China, the other with Perdue University in the U.S. has come up with what they believe is a viable way to cause a living organism to be in two places at the same time [phys.org]. In the paper they have posted to the arXiv server, Zhang-Qi Yin and Tongcang Li suggest that an experiment conducted at the University of Colorado recently, could be modified by placing a living organism into a superposition state, rather than using just a piece of metal.
...
Two years ago, researchers at the University of Colorado put a very small vibrating aluminum membrane into a superposition state—Li and Yin believe that if a microbe were put on the same type of membrane it could be put into a superposition state along with the membrane. They note that to date, no one has put any sort of living organism into a superposition state, despite a lot of interest in doing so by both academics and the public at large.

More specifically, the team suggests the way to make it work would involve cooling a common bacterium down to approximately 10mK to prevent chemical activity from taking place and energy from being exchanged with the environment, then causing the microbe to adhere to the membrane using natural forces. That should be enough, they theorize, to allow for the bacterium to be put into a superposition state along with the oscillating membrane.

Perhaps this will solve the classic question of time travel: what happens if one copy of you meets another?

Original Submission