What is a tardigrade?
Many people accept the toughest animal on earth is the tiny tardigrade. These little critters, known as “moss piglets”, can endure the most extreme conditions you can think of. From being bathed in boiling water, being shot out of a gun, living on the moon, and extreme radiation.
The impressive mechanism which allows them to be almost indestructible is their protective “tun” state. Here the tardigrade curls up into a ball, where their biological functions are suspended to endure the harsh conditions.
Tardigrades and quantum entanglement
Research, recently published in arXiv, has now uncovered that these tiny organisms may also be able to survive quantum entanglement! This is the process where minuscule subatomic particles are linked and impact each other’s actions, regardless of the distance between them.
Because this phenomenon is so weird, even Albert Einstein had doubts about the spooky situation. With him famously nicknaming the process “spooky action at a distance”.
How did scientists do it?
The research team froze the tardigrades and placed them in a circuit that formed a quantum bit or “quibit”, a unit of information used in quantum computing. The team saw that when the organism came in contact with the qubits, the properties of the subatomic particles changed. The tardigrade-qubit-hybrid was shown in further experiments to impact each other’s states in tandem, supporting the entanglement theory.
Some resistance
Although exciting, some early responses have taken issue with the finding. The paper has to go through peer review, where a number of experts in the field judge if their method holds up. If the results are upheld, this will be the first example of an animal undergoing quantum entanglement. Even if the quantum entanglement theory is disproven, more information about the incredible durability of tardigrades has been uncovered, feeding scientists inspiration for new materials and allowing a deeper understanding of the natural world.
Source study: arXiv – Entanglement between superconducting qubits and a tardigrade
The post Study: tardigrades can survive quantum entanglement first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.
What is a tardigrade? Many people accept the toughest animal on earth is the tiny tardigrade. These little critters, known as “moss piglets”, can endure the most extreme conditions you can think of. From being bathed in boiling water, being shot out of a gun, living on the moon, and extreme radiation. The impressive mechanism
The post Study: tardigrades can survive quantum entanglement first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.