I don't need to be told that it's "billions of times than ever before", or to compare it to the library of congress, I can understand measurements. so how big is the object? 1 nanometer? 1 kilometer? what? the article doesn't seem to say either.

I think the subject line says it all, but I want a transporter that puts me in two places at once, then destroys the first me leaving the copied me. That would be awesome.

... they disappeared.

Once we get into quantum computing, we're going to have to drop the whole binary "yes"-"no" thing for "yes", "no", "maybe", "uninitialized", "42"

They think it 'could have' significant implications?
Surely they mean it definitely has significant implications and also hasn't?

Hmmm, if I count correctly, a cat is still many orders of magnitude heavier. I can only hope that they will make further progress in the decades to come.

... to the size of a cat.

From what the article looks like, all they've done is created a BEC (They don't mention that in the article, am I off?) of the largest object yet, which just means they cooled the material to milli-kelvin using some kind of trap, and the material becomes a new state of matter, a Bose Einstein Condensate.

For some reason, I expected some kind of two-slit or uncertainty principle thing with a very large object. This doesn't really seem that impressive to me, but then my quantum is a bit dated.

I have a question that I assume has a reasonable answer, just one I've never actually gotten confirmation on.

Once they've placed this object in a quantum state, how do they verify that it's "occupying two states at once?" Do they just measure it and repeat the process several times, and note that it's occasionally at 1 quanta, occasionally at 0, and from that infer that it was in a quantum state up until they measured it?

Second question, while I'm here - am I right in saying that according to the many-worlds interpretation, the universe branches when this object enters a quantum state, and we end up in one of two universes, one where the object has 1 quanta of energy and one where it has 0?

Trying to grok all this "quantum mechanics" stuff :)

It's barely visible to the naked eye, but if you look under light magnification you can read a caption:

"I can has quantum state?"

If it is true that '"I don't think there is a limit, that there will be a certain size where quantum mechanics starts to break down," Dr Aspelmeyer said,' then that means that even larger objects also go into superpositions of quantum states. That would go all the way up to human sized and larger. This is the fundamental principle of the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI), that when quantum measurements occur, even though we only see one outcome, actually we go into a superposition of multiple states, each of which sees a different outcome. Each state evolves independently. It is as though the world splits into parallel universes, where every possible outcome occurs in a different universe.

This follows strictly from the principle that QM applies at all sizes. And this new experiment certainly pushes us in that direction.

Some scientists, notably Roger Penrose, had speculated that QM would break down at macroscopic sizes. He specifically proposed that once sizes were large enough for gravitational forces to exceed some threshold, QM would break down. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has this: "Tiny superpositions, e.g. an electron separated from itself, if isolated from environment, would require 10 million years to reach OR threshold. An isolated one kilogram object (e.g. Schrödinger's cat) would reach OR threshold in only 10^-37 seconds." Now here we have a trilliion atom object. That is about 10^13 amu, which is 10^-14 kg. Dividing 10^-37 seconds by 10^-14 we get 10^-23 seconds, which is far shorter than this experiment lasted. This means basically that this experiment disproves Penrose's theory! This is the first time this has happened, and I am (AFAIK) the first person to notice this.

In short it is becoming harder and harder to avoid accepting the reality of parallel worlds. What this should mean for our actions is up to the philosophers, but we should not bury our heads and pretend it isn't true.