That darn cat: The Magical Behavior Of Subatomic Particles Moves Into Real World

Oddly, Misha and I were just talking about this last night, though the context was Yoga: WSJ.com:The Magical Behavior Of Subatomic Particles Moves Into Real World - Science Journal (sub. req'd): The most famous feline in science belongs to Erwin Schrödinger, or at least to his fertile imagination. A founder of quantum physics in the early 20th century, Schrödinger wondered what would happen if the seemingly magical behavior of subatomic particles occurred not only in the micro realm but also up here in the macro world. Which is how he found himself in 1935 with an imaginary cat that was both alive and dead. [...] [S]cientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., scored a cat trick. They made each of six atoms spin in opposite directions at the same time. Each whirls like a top. But unlike any real top, the scientists reported in the journal Nature, each spins clockwise and counterclockwise simultaneously.

Note that because The Wall Street Journal actively discourages people from linking to their articles, this link will link somewhere else in a short period of time. Specifically, the WSJ doesn't (apparently) have a permanent link for these Science Journal columns, at least not one readily apparent.

In an essay at the Web site Edge.org, astrophysicist Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Study muses that quantum advances are making conventional understanding about what exists and what is real start to melt away. With "avant-garde insights" such as entanglement, he writes, the next scientific revolution could be a dissolution of the strict distinction between reality and fiction.

And for the taxonomists in the crowd, from that essay by Piet Hut: The ontologies of our worlds, concrete as well as abstract, have already started to melt away.