One of the more interesting articles in QM for the month

For the more advanced

http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2012.34.html

A more layman version is available at physics.org

http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-molecules-quantum-movie.html


The key point being => they reveal the single-particle character of complex quantum diffraction patterns on a macroscopic scale that is visible to the eye. You can see them emerge in real-time and they last for hours on the screen. The experiments thus render the wave-particle duality of quantum physics particularly tangible and conspicuous.


Our world just got a little less solid ... soon destined to join the flat earthers :-)

I don't think that is quite true. The flat earthers held a belief that was at odds with the observations that were available to the ancient Greeks. Their beliefs WERE fully in agreement with simple observations of the world around them. But even though QM shows that there is nothing really "solid" the observations that we make of the real world are still true. We still observe a solid world and that world works just fine. When we started traveling around the world the flat earth theory was completely undone. Nothing has caused any change in the solid world theory. Their are changes in the explanations of why the world is solid, but for almost all practical purposes we can still work with solids.

Bill Gill

I have problems with a few of your arguments



And solid earthers can be shown observations and infact we may soon have cameras capable of showing QM behaviour much like IR cameras.



How do you reconcile that any observation you and I make are not identical via Bell's inequality or are you taking a non scientific version of observation as per what a human eye sees?



True currently until you take them down to very cold temperatures where the solids become very unsolid and even superflow and appear not to be there as the QM effects really start to manifest.

To me your argument seems to centre around the word "observation" and what it means.

I added this in as a seperate post because it will probably have its own arguments.

Recently as a science community we have been discussing how some of our classic science teachings need to be revisited because of how far things have progressed with QM.

Basically the simplified lies we tell lower level students to make the world simple for them that are factually wrong and actually totally misleading.

This was in part of the motivation for starting this thread.

I saw a great article from Sacha recently about how a gecko hangs onto the ceiling and the classic lie we tell.

http://www.science20.com/alpha_meme/van_der_waals_force_or_gecko_feet_grasping_parallel_worlds-88347

No time to read the article now, but will try to go through them this weekend. This is interesting, but I suspect it's a continuing problem. I recall in middle school learning about the "Universal Set" in algebra 1 - although it had by that time been known for decades that there is no Universal Set. (Useful fiction in this case, but incorrect.)

It's not just a matter of getting stuff into textbooks - it's getting a generation of teachers who understand the stuff in detail at least sufficient to explain it. Popularizers (the Bill Nye's and N.D. Tysons) can play a role too - maybe a few really well done YT videos.