Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our normal comment rules apply to all other comments.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

Where can I buy one of these

I i understand correctly this could help solve a bunch of quantum physics paradox like Schrodinger's cat paradox or quantum entanglement, or is it to limited for this yet ?

[removed]

My uncle Tom was selling them but he got arrested for selling nuclear secrets to the Kiwis again.

This is great news for all the invisible men out there. They can finally stop being blind without losing their invisibility.

That hardly explained it at all, given the apparent violation of the uncertainty principle.

However the only clue I did find is in this sentence:

> Researchers say they were pleasantly surprised to discover their innovative device was able to observe the presence of a photosensitive object without irreversible photon absorption or causing quantum coherence to collapse.

Without irreversible photon absorption. Not "without photon absorption" as the article earlier implies.

Makes me think of the black dot in the corner of my eye that always disappears when I focus on it. Interesting if we can see more without directly focusing on it like a black hole

So, instead of the conventional method of shining UV light or infrared lasers or x-rays through an object to be able to see what light is absorbed or transmitted through your material, they have some sort of instrument that is absorbing microwave radiation?

Is that the gist of this? The article doesn't go into much detail, but it seems like that's probably all it is. Like the object is giving off microwave radiation, the qubit or whatever it is absorbs said radiation, maybe some electron orbitals are excited, and the qubit is able to tell us what the material is.

I mean, I'd hardly say that's not seeing the object. You're just absorbing energy in 3 dimensions instead of a laser going through the material and bouncing around mirrors to give you your read-out.

Edit: typo

Can someone smarter than me explain what’s going on here? How can something be measured or observed without interaction?

There aren’t any paradoxes in QM that I know of (purely within QM, there is a paradox between it and GR concerning black holes). A paradox means that a framework allows for two or more completely contradictory outcomes to occur, implying that the framework is flawed/incomplete. There’s nothing contradictory within QM atm. It does predict seemingly contradictory things, but these have all been experimentally verified, proving that they actually aren’t contradictory, our everyday intuition just doesn’t apply at quantum scales.

One arguable shortcoming of QM is that it only describes how things behave (the mechanics part of quantum mechanics), not how the underlying phenomena arise. Like, we know what happens to particles when you entangle them, but we still don’t fully understand what entanglement is. We’ve verified that it propagates faster than the speed of light, but we don’t know why. It would be like us understanding how things move under the influence of gravity but not knowing what gravity itself is (which we do know thanks to GR).

[removed]

What about the double slit experiment?

What about it? The outcomes of the experiment are unintuitive but repeatable.

Nothing about the double slit experiment is paradoxical. It’s just unintuitive.

Don’t let the quantum mechanics know you can see them, they’ll change their behaviour

I guess it's more along the lines of not "direct" interaction. Basically they aren't shining a laser through a material like plastic, for example, and having a detector on the other side measuring how much of the energy from the laser was absorbed by the plastic.

My guess is that the material is in some sort of chamber. Microwaves are being released in this sealed chamber that doesn't allow the microwaves to escape. The object absorbs this energy, and now the loss of the microwave energy that is present is less than what was released because the object isn't re-emitting the energy. The net difference in energy is giving us a measurable to do some sort of analysis.

So, while the energy isn't directly being blasted into this material and monitored on the other side of it, it's more of a 3-dimension energy absorption with the loss of energy being measured. This is all hypothetical of course since they didn't go into any details of what the experiment actually was, it's just my guess as someone who's done all sorts of instrumental analysis with other types of lab equipment. I think the title is more sensationalist than anything, but I'd like to be proven wrong.

It would be cool if there was some way to measure energy absorbance or emittance by skipping distance and time though.

Even to a layman such as myself this seems incredibly next next next level.

So, do you think that the object measured does have the capable to re-emit those photons? That phrasing is a bit confusing, but it seems like they're saying that normally for objects to be observed without direct interaction, the object would have to absorb the energy, and not re-emit it so we'd get a measurable.

They're saying the object measured has the capability to re-emit this energy, so it's more along the lines that they're preventing the re-emmittance (with the super conductors maybe?), and now measuring the energy lost from absorbance?

Wish they'd give some experimental details to clarify this. Otherwise it just seems like the author made up some exciting headline for clicks.

I don't know what to think since there's no detail here.

[removed]

The Schrödinger's cat thing is just some nonsense he said that science educators have adopted as a teaching method, God knows why. The entire point of the "thought experiment" was to make quantum mechanics seem ridiculous and incredible (in the literal sense of the word). It isn't a paradox at all. Quantum entanglement is not a paradox either; it just means something is going on that we don't understand yet.

Anyway, this study has nothing to do with "solving" either of those (quotation marks because I more mean "making the way the world works appear intuitive to humans, whose cognitive biases and other ridiculous habits of cognition are extraordinarily far from conducive to understanding reality").

[removed]

I don't understand any of it, my brain farted and now all I want to do is eat chocolate

[removed]

Maybe paradox is not the right word, but if this new method help give some amount of explanation of why those phenomenon that we observe happen then i think it's a pretty big deal.

i personally do not find the "this is how particle behave because magic" to be a complete and satisfactory answer.

edit : spelling

[removed]

Man i never thought about the sensory consequences of being invisible.

Id like to hear more about this black dot in your eye, if you don’t mind

That's great. Can someone PLEASE tell us if the cat made it or not now?

My read of the article is that this will not do that. This appears to be a novel technique for measuring information about quantum objects (specifically microwave photons) in an indirect way. What are the implications of that? Hard to say. But it probably won’t lead to any insights or discoveries in fundamental physics.

So can they finally check if that cats dead or alive

My question also.

Yes, we will finally get to see the cat!

Could something like this be used to overcome the uncertainty principle?

[deleted]

[removed]

I don't think there's anything new here EXCEPT for the specific mechanism they used. If you measure something but don't preserve the information, you can keep entanglement. That's what the researchers show here - they have very low certainly measurements and aren't breaking entanglement.

Here's a much older overview article of this technique: https://www.nature.com/articles/npjqi201522

>Weak measurement has provided new insight into the nature of quantum measurement, by demonstrating the ability to extract average state information without fully projecting the system. ... By correlating the results of weak ancilla measurements with subsequent projective readout, we achieve a violation of the BLGI with 27 s.d.s. of certainty.

Disclaimer: I'm just an amateur but keep up on the basics. I might be missing something very important

Nice job noting the distinction. “Just give the photon back, we didn’t detect nuttin’”

Edit: photon

It’s like when you have “dotted line” responsibilities on the org chart, and thing can be both your responsibility and not, at the same time.

[removed]

Just wake me up when Heisenberg is wrong for real.

Heisenberg Compensators!

>We show that it is possible to ascertain the presence of a microwave pulse resonant with the second transition of the transmon, while at the same time avoid exciting the device onto the third level. Experimentally, this is done by using a series of Ramsey microwave pulses coupled into the first transition and monitoring the ground-state population.

from the paper

Andy, use your peripherals.

[removed]

Their heat signature will increase though. Thermodynamics trample any quantum weirdness. You want to get information? Pay energy price.

The whole point of Schrödinger's Cat is to point out that the Copenhagen interpretation allows an obviously absurd situation to occur, so that interpretation must be incorrect, and instead, something like Many Worlds, Superdeterminism, or another theory must be correct (despite the anachronism, he knew Copenhagen was wrong, but not what was right).

I felt dumber the more I read the title.

As long as you don’t come at me with a straight jacket. It’s like you looking for something and you can’t find it until your mind is set on something else and then you find the thing laying on the table that you passed 7 times while searching for it.

That's quite something, if my plebian understanding is correct