leaking out spy sunglasses
Light or a subatomic particle like an spy sunglasses could be a wave or a particle depending on how you want to look at it, and causes are not guaranteed to be linked to effects. An electron could be in two places at once, or everywhere until someone measures it, courtesy of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which caused a cranky Einstein to grumble that God did not play dice.Erwin Schr?dinger, one of the founders of the theory as was Einstein, for that matter once complained that according to quantum principles a cat in a box would be both alive and dead until somebody looked at it.
Until recent years this was all philosophy, and physicists could comfort themselves with the realization that quantum mechanics works so spectacularly well every time you turn on your computer, for example that for some of them the real problem is why the ordinary world does not work that way; why, for example, your sunglasses are not simultaneously in the car, back at the summer cabin or on the shelf when you want them spy sunglasses.
Now scientists are able to direct spy sunglasses and catch nature in the act of being quantum and thus explore the boundary between quantum reality and normal life. Their work involves isolating the individual nuggets of spy sunglasses atoms and the particles that transmit light, known as photons and making them play with each other.Dr. Haroche and Dr. Wineland, who have been good friends for 25 years, have approached the dance between matter and light from opposite sides. Dr. Haroche traps photons in a mirrored cavity whose walls are so finely polished that one photon will bounce back and forth for a tenth of a second an eternity in atomic physics before leaking out or being absorbed. Then he sends in a single atom, as a spy, to interact with the light.
Normally, to detect light is to destroy spy sunglasses, since photons are absorbed in our retinas or in the chips in our cameras. But in one case, by observing subtle effects of the light on the atoms, he and his colleagues could count the photons as one would do with marbles in a box, as he put it on his Web site without destroying them.In another case spy sunglasses, in 1996, Dr. Haroche and his colleagues raised Schr?dingers cat from the undead by putting their boxed photon into a cat state in which it was out of phase with itself, essentially oscillating in opposite directions at the same time. Then by sending in their spy atoms, they measured how long spy sunglasses took for the cat state to decay or decohere in quantumspeak and the photon to oscillate in one direction or the other spy sunglasses.
