Schrödinger's virus-thought experiment may soon be realized

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Schrödinger’s intention was to illuminate the paradoxes of the quantum world. But superposition (the existence of a thing in two or more quantum states simultaneously) is real and is, for example, the basis of quantum computing. A pair of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, now propose to do what Schrödinger could not, and put a living organism into a state of quantum superposition.

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The organism Ignacio Cirac and Oriol Romero-Isart have in mind is the flu virus. Pedants might object that viruses are not truly alive, but that is a philosophical rather than a naturalistic argument, for they have genes and are capable of reproduction—a capability they lose if they are damaged. The reason for choosing a virus is that it is small.

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Dr Cirac and Dr Romero-Isart therefore propose putting the virus inside a microscopic cavity and cooling it down to its state of lowest energy (ground state, in physics parlance) using a piece of apparatus known as a laser trap. This ingenious technique—which won its inventors, one of whom was Steven Chu, now America’s energy secretary, a Nobel prize—works by bombarding an object with laser light at a frequency just below that which it would readily absorb and re-emit if it were stationary. This slows down the movement, and hence the temperature, of its atoms to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero.

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For that to work, however, the virus will need to have certain physical properties. It will have to be an insulator and to be transparent to the relevant laser light. And it will have to be able to survive in a vacuum. Such viruses do exist. The influenza virus is one example. Its resilience is legendary. It can survive exposure to a vacuum, and it seems to be an insulator—which is why the researchers have chosen it. And if the experiment works on a virus, they hope to move on to something that is indisputably alive: a tardigrade.


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http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14539712


edited to fix link

"viruses are not truly alive, but...they... are capable of reproduction"
How would that be possible?

Whether or not something reproduces is a factor in determining life, but it's not the only one. Crystals, for example, will form on their own and nucleate new crystal formation, but they're not alive. Viruses aren't alive because they can't replicate on their own, and have none of their own internal processes - they need to hijack a host cell.

Viruses are most often considered replicators rather than forms of life. They have been described as "organisms at the edge of life",since they possess genes, evolve by natural selection, and replicate by creating multiple copies of themselves through self-assembly. However, viruses do not metabolise and require a host cell to make new products. Virus self-assembly within host cells has implications for the study of the origin of life, as it may support the hypothesis that life could have started as self-assembling organic molecules

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life

rather than superposition of active processes within a still living cell.

Viruses fail to meet expectations for life on many levels as living things. I've read and listened to various papers and lectures for decades that play with the notion of viruses as being "demivital" and "paenebiotic."

Folks outside of biology have trouble with the conceptualizations of viruses as non-living, but then folks outside biology often have trouble with energy catabolism, too. Many people are convinced that cells burn carbon for energy and that in the process of cellular metabolism the oxygen that they inhale becomes the CO2 in they exhale.

:D

It always pissed me off that Schrodinger chose a cat.

That is such a "I am *so* not amused" look ...
:yoiks:

I prefer the Many Worlds interpretation. :)

laser beams...

If the light were going in the opposite direction, would the opposite happen?

laws of the universe in order to get the light to reverse it's outward radiation thingy.

Your details don't describe the quantum superposition which is the really interesting part. I'll check the link. Thanks.

I really think they should use the swine flu virus
for this experiment..... The cosmic irony would
be awesome... Its just the wrong type of the virus
in structure or as they call it, morphological virus type for this experiment.


"quantum superposition" is the fundamental law of quantum mechanics. It defines the collection of all possible states that an object can have.
In fact, quantum superposition results in many directly observable effects, such as interference peaks from an electron wave in a double-slit experiment. The superpositions, however, persist at all scales, absent a mechanism for removing them. This mechanism can be philosophical as in the Copenhagen interpretation, or physical.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_superposition


Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment, often described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday objects. The thought experiment presents a cat that might be alive or dead, depending on an earlier random event. In the course of developing this experiment, he coined the term

To further illustrate the putative incompleteness of quantum mechanics, Schrödinger applied quantum mechanics to a living entity that may or may not be conscious. In Schrödinger’s original thought experiment, he describes how one could, in principle, transform a superposition inside an atom to a large-scale superposition of a live and dead cat by coupling cat and atom with the help of a "diabolical mechanism". He proposed a scenario with a cat in a sealed box, wherein the cat's life or death was dependent on the state of a subatomic particle. According to Schrödinger, the Copenhagen interpretation implies that the cat remains both alive and dead (to the universe outside the box) until the box is opened.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger%27s_cat

I was always fascinated by this physic thought experiment.
I'm excited that our Department of Energy, Dr. Chu, nobel prize and work made this experiment possible

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APAAbu9DXLs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1otPs4slq0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PelTWCUmTsU


Will there ever be a cure for HIV And AIDS?

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Will_there_ever_be_a_cure_for_HIV_And_AIDS
Alternative Answer

Possibly yes, if you consider alternative medicine like Nick Nolte and Magic Johnson and others.

1984 U.S. Patent #4,647,773 Method of continuous production of retroviruses (HTLV-III) from patients with AIDS and pre-AIDS (Dr. Robert C. Gallo, et. al.)
1990 U.S. Patent #5,188,738 Alternating current supplied electrically conductive method and system for treatment of blood and / or synthetic fluids with electrical forces. (Dr. Steven Kaali, et. al.)

1997 U.S. Patent #5,676,977 Method of curing AIDS with tetrasilver tetroxide molecular crystal devices (Marvin S. Antelman, Israel)

A person treated using the 1997 patented one-time injection claims to be HIV-free several years afterwards. Starting in 2003 Dr. Boyd Ed Graves has petitioned the US courts and US congress to institute funding for clinical trials. Microsoft's Bill Gates was notified that the HIV AIDS cure had been tested on subjects and known to work.

According to Dr. Robert C. Beck, DSc. Physics, slightly over 2 thousands AIDS patients in Southern California having undergone "The Beck Protocol" that is derived from the Dr. Steven Kaali MD method were pronounced as having PCR tests indicating that they had viral loads indistinguishable from zero on the measurement equipment used to conduct such testing.

Magic Johnson, a long known HIV AIDS patient, has undergone unconventional therapies (in either Germany or Cuba or India or Mexico) such as medical grade intravenous (IV) ozone treatments and has survived many years (supposedly with the disease). (See Dr. Robert Rowen MD Describes Benefits of Ozone Therapy).

An intracellular compound that is a mixture of DMSO, chlorine dioxide, citric acid, and other ingredients is being discussed in alternative medicine blogs as having a profound immune system enhancing effect. The mixture ingredients have been changed slightly over the past few years, but has come to be known as the Overnight Cancer Cure.

See the huge list of related links in the Related Question "Can HIV be cured?" below ...

There may be. Doctors are working very hard on it.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Will_there_ever_be_a_cure_for_HIV_And_AIDS



http://www.gesundohnepillen.de/patent.htm

This technology has been absolutely suppressed. It really cant go public all at once because it would destroy the economy. All we can do is spread the word and slowly it will become publicly accepted and common knowlege.You can read more on this at http://curesforalldiseases.com