The Corporate Masters have launched a “featured blogger” program, asking individual ScienceBloggers to comment on news articles from the main site, and publishing the responses with the magazine piece. I just did one on new quantum experiments, which was posted today.
The news article is Supersizing Quantum Behavior by Veronique Greenwood. My piece is Reconciling an Ordinary World, which starts out:
One of the most vexing things about studying quantum mechanics is how maddeningly classical the world is. Quantum physics features all sorts of marvelous things–particles behaving like waves, objects in two places at the same time, cats that are both alive and dead–but we don’t see those things in the world around us. When we look at an everyday object, we see it in a definite classical state and not in any of the strange combinations of states allowed by quantum mechanics. Particles and waves look completely different, dogs can only pass on one side or the other of an obstacle, and cats are stubbornly alive or dead, not both at once.
(That’s more or less a direct lift from the opening of Chapter 3 of the book. Why mess with what works?)
If you want to read the rest, click through to the magazine. If you want to complain about how badly I misrepresented some technical point, you know where the comments are.