Last November, two teams of researchers announced that they had created a type of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC --a cluster of particles that acts like a single, enormous, quantum-mechanical oBEC --aout of a class of particles known as fermions (ScienceNOW, 13 NovemBEC --a03).
Beyond that there would have no other solid-solid phase transition can be expected, except the nontrivial melting of Wigner crystals induced by enormous nuclear quantum kinetic energy.
Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna, Austria, for instance, has made tiny Schrödinger's cats out of individual molecules of C70, enormous by quantum standards (ScienceNOW, 25 May 2001).
The researchers took C70 molecules (70-carbon buckminsterfullerenes, enormous by quantum standards), heated them with a laser beam, and shot them through a series of gratings that essentially forced each molecule to choose among several paths.
This is the basic reason why the first measurement problem M1 is an enormous difficulty for quantum interpretations in which the only possible time dependence for a closed quantum system is that given by Schrödinger's equation.
This would close the gap between theory and practice, so that science could stop being schizophrenic, accepting the enormous successes of quantum theory while not taking its consequences seriously.
Quantum computing has long been an academic curiosity, and there are enormous challenges to handling quantum information reliably.
The profits from Google's online ad business make it free to dedicate enormous resources to its quantum computing lab should it wish.
Although the potential of quantum computers is enormous, the requirements are equally stringent.
Among the challenges here are that quantum computers take enormous cooling systems that in some cases are colder than outer space (we're talking seriously cold).
