It’s
pretty cool when our species is looking at the end pf human
civilisation to get this insight into the nature of Consciousness.
I
remember reading the Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra about quantum
physics and how subatomic particles behaved either like a wave or a
particle, depending on the observer.
“ZENO
EFFECT” VERIFIED: ATOMS WON’T MOVE WHEN THEY’RE BEING WATCHED
1
July, 2016
Physicists
from Cornell University have proved that
atoms will not move when someone is observing them. This is also
known as Zeno Effect. This particular effect was reflected as one of
the oddest predictions of quantum theory, but the experiments
performed by physicists in the Utracold Lab of Muknud Vengalattore,
have now successfully confirmed it.
For the experiment
Muknud Vengalattore, assistant professor of physics, and graduate
students Yogesh Patil and Srivatsan K. Chakram generated and cooled a
gas of about a billion Rubidium atoms inside a vacuum chamber and
suspended the mass between laser beams.
This
is when the team detected something exclusive: The atoms wouldn’t
show any movement as long as they were under any kind of observation.
The more often the team used a laser to measure the manners, the less
movement they saw. The only way the atoms would move was when the
researchers turned down the strength of the laser, or turned it off
completely. Then the atoms organized themselves easily into a lattice
pattern, just as they would if they were crystallizing.
It
must feel pretty awesome to stop atoms just by looking at them, but
there are much greater consequences for this discovery. For instance,
it demonstrates that quantum
cryptography should
work— meaning an intruder can’t spy on your communications
without destroying the data.
“This
gives us an unprecedented tool to control a quantum system, perhaps
even atom by atom,” said Patil, lead author of the paper. Moreover,
this work opens the door to a fundamentally new method to manipulate
the quantum states of atoms and could lead to new kinds of
sensors, explains
the Cornell Chronicle.
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