My qualifications to write about science are based on the fact that, as a kid, I used to religiously watch Lost in Space every week.  Damn, I loved that robot.

Anyway, my mom also bought me a set of Young People’s Science Encyclopedias (as well as a small version of the robot) when I was about nine, so coupled with my devotion to Lost in Space, I think my scientific bona fides are pretty clear.

As a true friend of science, no matter my qualifications to write about it, I am a sucker for science books written for “general readers,” which try to make difficult concepts like relativity theory and quantum mechanics understandable (to the extent they  can be understood) to folks who don’t have a background in science.  

Many years ago, while waiting in the doctor’s office, I happened upon an article in Time magazine about John Bell’s theorem, and off I went into quantum weirdness.  I have tried ever since to wrap my head around the strange world of quantum theory, which has proven very difficult.  Just when I think I am beginning to see through a glass darkly, some new concept pops up, and complete ignorance once again returns.

Anyhow, on Thursday Scientific American published an article, “Macro-Weirdness: ‘Quantum Microphone’ Puts Naked-Eye Object in 2 Places at Once.”  Now, that title may sound counter-intuitive to those unfamiliar with the “new science” (which is about 100 years old now), but trust me, the idea that things can be in more than one place at the same time is pretty common in quantum theory.

What’s news in the article is that researchers working at Los Alamos National Laboratory have shown that an object larger than a molecule, in this case only “the width of a hair” and “made up of about 10 trillion atoms,” “acts as if it exists in two places at once.”

Admittedly, at first glance the feat doesn’t sound that impressive.  After all, each individual atom in the object in question “only moves by an extremely small distance“—which turns out to be less than the size of one of the individual atoms—thus in the so-called “superposition of states” the object “is never really in two totally distinct places.” 

To physicists, however, the feat was quite impressive: “The experiment showed that a large object…can display just as much quantum weirdness as single atoms do.”

The real problem, though, is much bigger:

As to how the day-to-day reality of objects that we observe, such as furniture and fruit, emerges from such a different and exotic quantum world, that remains a mystery.

Mystery, indeed.  The point of this short excursion into the bizarre world of the small is to hopefully encourage a few people—who have no technical training—to explore the large world of science, which is at least as stimulating and exciting as, well, reruns of Lost in Space.