Reality Bites the Dust
And you thought quantum physics couldn't get any weirder. Sure, you may think you've shed every assumption you had about the physical world in order to accommodate decaying nuclei that are in two states at once or photons that instantly affect each other even though they're light years apart. But no! I bet you still think that quantum equations describe reality. Alas, according to a paper recently published in Nature, quantum physicists may have to dispense with the assumption of realism, the idea that objects actually have specific properties such as color or location or spin, independent of whether they are observed. Many years ago, physicist John Bell showed that local realism doesn't hold in the quantum world. Most physicists assumed that locality—the notion that local behavior can only be affected by local actions—is violated in quantum mechanics; they hardly thought to question the "realism" part of "local realism." But now, experiments by a team of Viennese scientists show that non-local realistic theories do not suffice to explain quantum behavior. The researchers conclude that physicists must abandon certain aspects of realism to explain the world. What does this mean? It's hard to say. Author Anton Zeilinger suggests that we may have to abandon the idea of counterfactuals in the quantum world. As a companion piece in Nature says, "'We do this all the time in daily life,' says Zeilinger—for example, imagining what would have happened if you had tried to cross the road when a truck was coming. If the world around us behaved in the same way as a quantum system, then it would be meaningless even to imagine that alternative situation, because there would be no way of defining what you mean by the road, the truck, or even you." Now that's surreal.
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Clone Consolidation
Since everyone's favorite pandas failed to mate, the world has been bereft of celebrity animal sex news. But we didn't have to wait long for the next prospective couple: Snuppy, the first cloned dog, is now destined to mate with Bona, the second cloned dog, later this year. Snuppy, who was created by a Seoul National University team led by the infamous researcher Hwang Woo-Suk, turned two last week. Bona was born on June 18, 2006. Doesn't that mean that by the end of this year she won't even be 11 in dog years? Perhaps, but researchers are eager to study the reproductive capacity of the two Afghan hounds. While much of Hwang's research was discredited by authorities, it still appears that Snuppy is an authentic clone. Two years into his life, Snuppy is healthy and happy, SNU scientists say.