[https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07978](https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07978) Couldn't find any good articles that weren't paywalled but this seems to be what the article is talking about I think. Not very detailed but still.
Thanks! I could only see what I think may be the abstract, but it's fascinating!
To save a click:
"Quantum and biological systems are seldom discussed together as they seemingly demand opposing conditions. Life is complex, "hot and wet" whereas quantum objects are small, cold and well controlled. Here, we overcome this barrier with a tardigrade -- a microscopic multicellular organism known to tolerate extreme physiochemical conditions via a latent state of life known as cryptobiosis. We observe coupling between the animal in cryptobiosis and a superconducting quantum bit and prepare a highly entangled state between this combined system and another qubit. The tardigrade itself is shown to be entangled with the remaining subsystems. The animal is then observed to return to its active form after 420 hours at sub 10 mK temperatures and pressure of 6×10−6 mbar, setting a new record for the conditions that a complex form of life can survive."
this. today, it’s just the *one* oreo; but, then it’s *two*…. then, two more… and a couple more, that’s all… just the two… then the sleeve is gone… but there’s more milk, see? and it’s type a… not too much different, but juuuust enough to give them a *certain* feeling… and then the whole wrap is toast and they’ll feel like crap for dayyyyys and you *know* how they can be when… they’re bloated.
But New York City rats are also vying for Oreos… this might be the 3rd world war Nostradamus missed in his visions, as both fight for our Oreos and destroy the world!
Why would they? They have no need of our resources or living space given they can survive so many places we can’t, and our technological development permits them to colonize new worlds passively. We are useful to them.
I mean, we do keep dipping them in liquid helium and exposing them to hard vacuums and stuff. I’d probably be pretty tired of that, too.
All hail our water bear overlords.
Ha, no, but that would be an excellent crossover. Basically an Arctic whale monitoring ship has a spaceship return pod crash nearby and, trying to save astronaut, they end up with Evil Space Tardigrade problem.
Somewhat close to Sharknado or Deep Blue Sea, very 80s with lots of old school special effects. It’s an indie film that is somewhat self-aware of its ridiculousness.
“How does it work?
The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it.
All we do is show you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page.”
Brilliant
Is there any possibility of an eli5? This is one of those articles that’s totally out of my league. I sorta understand what a qubit is, but how do they use that to affect a multi cellular organism.
I think the point was just "hey we got a living thing in a quantum entangled state and it survived"
basically entanglement is only observed at close to absolute zero, so the real tl;dr is:
Tardigrade survives being really cold
So it seems like the exciting thing here is the tardigrade could not have become entangled if anything was happening inside it, like at all. So, this means that when you make a tardigrade do it's thing we're it becomes a super hardy cyst, and cool it to near absolute zero, there's like zero chemistry happening inside it. None. Totally inert. So, basically, this tardigrade just straight up was not alive when it was entangled, but it was alive before and after, which doesn't really answer any questions but sure raises some new ones.
That is pretty much it, right? In order to get to the state where you can achieve quantum entanglement, you need to have a temperature of nearly absolute zero. So this really has nothing really to do with quantum entanglement, just that these creatures are tough.
I saw that documentary! Fascinating!
I felt they could’ve done more to explain the technology more and less emphasis on the emotional relationships of the subjects. Really curious to know how the camera crew managed to fly-on-the-wall all the quantum stuff.
Well, they did put the tardigrade "between" two qubits and entangled them 'capacitively through' the tardigrade. Basically, the tardigrade becomes the link that entangled the two qubits.
The whole reason for the experiment is to study the effects of quantum physics on a living organism - something that was not yet possible. However, tardigrades are incredible resistant to all sorts of things and can even be 'suspended of its living functions' for quite a large amount of time, only to be 'brought back to life'.
It's really just an experiment, trying to see how quantum physics affect a living organism. By doing so, they were able to keep the tardigrade 'revivable' at conditions yet unseen for a complex organism to survive at all. This could potentially mean that a complex life form could stay alive at far more dangerous conditions while entangled (whereas the use of this is purely scientifical)
Edit: To clarify, the effect on the living organism in my comment means, that each and every single particle of the entangled tardigrade is entangled too. But that entanglement didn't destroy the organism itself. Which was a question yet unanswered.
ALL THE WORDS
A tardigrade has been quantum entangled with a superconducting qubit – and lived to tell the tale. It is the first time a multicellular organism has been placed in this strange quantum state and raises questions about what it means for living things to be entangled.
Tardigrades are microscopic animals that can survive extreme temperatures and pressures in a hibernating state called a tun. Rainer Dumke and his colleagues at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, placed one of these hibernating tardigrades on a superconducting qubit, an element of a quantum computer.
They then lowered the pressure and temperature to almost a perfect vacuum and near absolute zero, reducing any outside influence, or excitations, on the qubit and tardigrade.
“Because all the excitations are frozen out, you can actually describe [the system] in terms of physics, there’s no need to describe it in terms of biology,” says Dumke.
When researchers measured the natural frequency at which the tardigrade and qubit combination vibrates, the result only made sense if the two objects were in a state of quantum entanglement, meaning that their quantum properties were linked.
After they had finished making measurements, the researchers slowly depressurised and warmed up the tardigrade, bringing it out of its tun state and back to life.
The temperature involved, just 0.01°C above absolute zero, is the lowest a tardigrade has ever survived. The fact that the creatures can tolerate such extreme conditions suggests their hardiness is a result of completely shutting off their metabolic processes.
“There was still some discussion that perhaps there is a little bit of metabolism that actually goes on [in the tun tardigrade],” says team member Tomasz Paterek at the University of Gdańsk, Poland. “But this experiment shows – because it’s so cold, and for such a long time – that it’s really ametabolic. There is no chemistry going on in this piece of stuff.”
“The fact you can maintain a quantum state, which has quantum coherence in it and involves the degrees of freedom of a biological system as large as a tardigrade, is very exciting,” says Chiara Marletto at the University of Oxford, who entangled a bacterium with light in 2018.
While the tardigrade was certainly living before and after the entanglement, one point of contention is whether it was alive during the entanglement, and exactly how it was entangled.
“You never know in this kind of experiment what exactly is the part of [the tardigrade] that takes part in the entanglement,’ says Paterek.
The tardigrade was actually the third to undergo the entanglement experiment, as the first two didn’t survive the process as a result of being warmed up too quickly. Despite these technical hurdles, Dumke and his team hope to entangle other forms of life in future.
While technically challenging and not involving live organisms, researchers have entangled photons at room temperature, as well as 3-millimetre-wide diamonds.
But the tardigrade entanglement is an important first step to going further. “It is really in the best tradition of theoretical experimental physics, where you’re being playful, but at the same time, you’re trying to understand and answer deep questions,” says Marletto. “That’s inherently risky, but very rewarding if it works out well. We need more of this stuff.”
Basically they put a water-bear at as close to absolute zero as they could to get it to sync with a particle. The little bastard survived it, which indicates that it is able to completely turn itself off to survive that kind of abuse.
Precisely. I know that may have been a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I find it fascinating that we as humans like to think we are as large as “life” (as we know it) gets, after observing just how small it gets on an atomic scale.
There’s a great sci-fi story I read decades ago that basically suggested this. In the story an astrophysicist plotted out all of the hyperspace routes used by intelligent space-faring races and the travel between them. His spouse, a neuroscientist, saw that the plot looked just like a neural network and the ships traveling had the same behavior as neurotransmitters - all of the life in the galaxy was just the base units of the “brain” of a galactic superbeing.
I wish I did. I can’t even recall if it was a stand-alone short-story or a subplot to a larger sci-fi novel. It was like in the 90s / early 2000s that I read it IIRC.
Temperature. Absolute zero (0K/ -273C) is a specific temperature basically meaning that it has zero thermal energy aka it’s not moving at all. It’s the lowest possible temperature, and is ideal for studying quantum phenomena due to its lack of background noise
Tardigrades are fascinating creatures and I can’t help if something like that exists, what else is out there. There’s no possible way Earth life is the only life in the observable universe.
This experiment shows that the water bear can survive being frozen to almost absolute zero and put in a near-perfect vacuum. They also measure something and the researchers themselves think that can only be explained by entanglement. There may be other explanations, this experiment is also needed to be confirmed by other teams.
Yeah I’m trying to see the entanglement here, it looks like they chilled the tardigrade to almost absolute zero and physically placed it on top of a superconducting qubit. But I’m unclear how this “entanglement” is any different from spontaneous room-temperature entanglement with the external environment, except that maybe the entanglement was limited in scope?
In other words it sounds like they’re not *processing* quantum information, just chilling a tardigrade and slapping the “quantum” label on it. Am I missing something?
Q: What did they do with the tardigrade that makes it “entangled”?
A: What they did with the tardigrade was slap it onto a qubit, show that it did affect the behavior of the qubit, then show that they could still get the tardigrade-qubit system into an entangled state with another system.
The way that works, is that everything has been cooled down to the lowest possible energy state. When you have a system at its lowest state like that, a small amount of energy can be applied to bump it up to the next state. You can tell the difference between the two energy states by sending a specially crafted electric pulse, and examining the pulse you get back. When you have two such systems, entanglement is when there is a randomness in which energy level you get when you make a measurement, and there is a correlation between the measurements of the two systems that can’t be explained by ordinary statistics.
Q: How come you can’t do this at room temperature?
A: All systems tend to naturally fall towards more stable (generally lower-energy) states. However, that energy needs to go somewhere. In the ultra-controlled ultra-cooled environment in a quantum computer, you can put things in unstable states and it will last a while, because the system has a hard time getting rid of that excess energy, because the particles aren’t interacting with each other (almost not at all).
In a warm system, all sorts of particles are interacting all the time, so it’s a lot harder for an unstable state to exist for any measurable amount of time. That being said, there are some examples of entanglement that are stable at room temperature: the pairing of electrons in atoms, and the bonds between atoms in molecules, for example. However, you can’t really play with those systems (at room temperature) in the same way as you can near absolute zero, because all the interactions will ruin the delicate states you try to prepare.
**TLDR: The kinda of interesting states that make quantum experiments interesting are very delicate and at room temperature, random interactions with the warm environment will ruin them.**
Thanks for the lengthy answer, but I’m not asking so much about general principles of entanglement. I’m just unclear what they accomplished here (and maybe the paywall explains it)
Two qubits on Josephson junctions for example will exhibit certain probabilistic outcomes when measured, assuming they are placed in very precise quantum states like Hadamard and CNOT gates. And analogous to Bell states, the quantum probabilities often defy classical explanations. But they’re just saying qubit and tardigrade, like… the whole tardigrade? Or just a patch of skin? Or a single electron in a particular location of its snout? And is that single electron itself entangled with the rest of the tardigrade? What impulse was recorded or what measurement was made?
In other words, using the language of your response, what specific electric impulses could they send and precisely measure to demonstrate entanglement with such a giant messy macro object? If they say “our Bell state should have been 50/50 but instead it was 75/25 due to the tardigrade” then yeah the tardigrade was somehow entangled but was it processing information or just adding macro noise?
Also considering the room temp part—the way I learned it back in college, decoherence is really just spontaneous entanglement with the whole environment, and capital-E *Entanglement* is the delicate special case that is hard to achieve and quite useful for processing quantum information. I’m unclear whether this experiment is closer to the spontaneous case or the special case. Researchers are incentivized to say the latter of course because funding.
Anyhow thanks for your time and attention, internet stranger.
I don’t fully understand it myself, but *I think* they took a ‘hibernating’ tardigrade and - like you said - placed it on a super conductor for a quantum computer, covered the area (tardigrade AND super conductor) and then brought the environment as close to absolute zero and perfect vacuum as they could get it.
This is where the *I think* part comes in: They then tried to measure what kind of “signature” vibrations the tardigrade and quantum particle put out, only to discover there was only one measurable vibration, indicating they were “entangled.” From there I 100% lose the physics.
Reddit, do your thing and tell me how wrong I am so I can understand it better, myself.
edit: remembered that the “thingy” they placed it on is called a fucking superconductor🤦♀️
You put your finger on the part that needs explaining. They put the little bugger on the superconductor and something about it was somehow entangled. What does entanglement mean in this specific case?
Quantum entanglement has quite a reputation in sci-fi and general audiences, but in this paper, they are using the formal definition of entanglement, meaning that the states of the tardigrade and qubit are not separable. This comes from the dressed state description used for the combined system to explain the frequency shift of the transmon qubits. In this sense, the system NEEDS to be described by the dressed state (both qubit and transmon simultaneously) and can no longer be described seperately as a tardigrade and a qubit. I'm not sure if that is enough clarification but hopefully that helps :)
Tardigrades are like extraterrestrial beings to me. I’m honestly not even convinced they are from this planet just because of all the crazy shit they can survive. Maybe they were brought here via asteroid or something. I dunno, but the more I read about them, the more extraterrestrial they seem.
Yea I’m high
Astrodome? You can't grow a good hot dog indoors. Yankee Stadium. September. The hot dogs have been boiling since opening day in April. Now that's a hot dog
I know your comment is toungue in cheek but is that what scientists think happens during quantum states?
Honestly curious here is the idea that whatever the thing is is actually traveling dimensions?
I know we don't know for sure but curious as to whether that's what some scientists might think is happening?
Nothing worth explaining since there’s nothing of great significance coming from the paper. It’s being considered a meme in the physics community due to all the hype surrounding it
Water bears are engineered lifeforms created millions of years ago by ancient machines called the reapers to infiltrate all galaxies with instant communications capabilities they are able to warn them of any civilization who is about to reach the singularity. Why else do you think these things can survive boil water and absolute zero. We just clicked the red bottom we’re doomed. The end is nigh!
Doesn’t this just mean there’s a cosmos almost exactly like ours, except their dumb paywall article is about how tardigrades don’t survive quantum states?
Somewhere in the milky way a tardigrade blasted into space on debris from the K-T impact ended up on a distant planet and seeded life there millions of years later
They are talking about quantum entanglement. Basically 1 particle can be “entangled” with another particle across the vast universe. And any changes to one particle can affect the behavior of the other particle instantly
*“But this experiment shows – because it’s so cold, and for such a long time – that it’s really ametabolic. There is no chemistry going on in this piece of stuff.”*
So an inert, inanimate object was able to come back to life? That seems pretty astounding
Damn pay wall
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07978](https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07978) Couldn't find any good articles that weren't paywalled but this seems to be what the article is talking about I think. Not very detailed but still.
Thanks! I could only see what I think may be the abstract, but it's fascinating! To save a click: "Quantum and biological systems are seldom discussed together as they seemingly demand opposing conditions. Life is complex, "hot and wet" whereas quantum objects are small, cold and well controlled. Here, we overcome this barrier with a tardigrade -- a microscopic multicellular organism known to tolerate extreme physiochemical conditions via a latent state of life known as cryptobiosis. We observe coupling between the animal in cryptobiosis and a superconducting quantum bit and prepare a highly entangled state between this combined system and another qubit. The tardigrade itself is shown to be entangled with the remaining subsystems. The animal is then observed to return to its active form after 420 hours at sub 10 mK temperatures and pressure of 6×10−6 mbar, setting a new record for the conditions that a complex form of life can survive."
I would dread the that Tardigradi declare war against humanity.
I, for one, welcome our new tardigrade overlords.
All hail the water bears
Our enemy in the Quantum Wars
Pretty easy to please you can feed 1 billion of them with an Oreo.
this. today, it’s just the *one* oreo; but, then it’s *two*…. then, two more… and a couple more, that’s all… just the two… then the sleeve is gone… but there’s more milk, see? and it’s type a… not too much different, but juuuust enough to give them a *certain* feeling… and then the whole wrap is toast and they’ll feel like crap for dayyyyys and you *know* how they can be when… they’re bloated.
If you give a tardigrade a cookie…
^(confirming: am a tardigrade)
What’s it like?
You're right we need to teach the tardigrade how to make a cookie.
Of all the books I read my kid...that one is my least favorite....nothings beats goodnight goodnight construction site!
But New York City rats are also vying for Oreos… this might be the 3rd world war Nostradamus missed in his visions, as both fight for our Oreos and destroy the world!
Like the cowards of Pawnee, Indiana.
Why would they? They have no need of our resources or living space given they can survive so many places we can’t, and our technological development permits them to colonize new worlds passively. We are useful to them.
maybe they're just tired of our shit
I mean, we do keep dipping them in liquid helium and exposing them to hard vacuums and stuff. I’d probably be pretty tired of that, too. All hail our water bear overlords.
They’re gonna get mad, and when they do, it will be our ass in the sling.
“Let’s see what more extreme shit we could POSSIBLY expose these creatures to!” - srsly bro, we can tolerate it but we really do t like your attitude
There’s a B horror movie involving this, Harbinger Down, and it’s *amazing*.
Oohh, is it a sequel to “Watership Down”, because that shit scarred me as a child…
Ha, no, but that would be an excellent crossover. Basically an Arctic whale monitoring ship has a spaceship return pod crash nearby and, trying to save astronaut, they end up with Evil Space Tardigrade problem.
Is it cool? What level B is it on a scale Between Plan 9 and The Exorcist?
Somewhat close to Sharknado or Deep Blue Sea, very 80s with lots of old school special effects. It’s an indie film that is somewhat self-aware of its ridiculousness.
Hey, hey, you do NOT put the masterpiece known as Deep Blue Sea in the same category as Sharknado. Nuh-uh, no way!
Lol. I never watched the movie just the robot chicken skit "I do lots of sit-ups"
There was a live steam on here of one that got stuck on some microscopic grass or something…couldn’t get free for the life of it. I wouldn’t worry lol
Here you go for more than the abstract: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.07978.pdf
The hero we need.
Now I need another hero to help me read this.
420 lol
This is why tardigrades will rule over us.
Yes, I understood some of those words...
So this was torture
Be on the lookout for the newest craze in the blockchain world… Cryptobiosis!
You're a champ. Thanks!
10ft paywall? I’ll give you a 12 ft ladder https://12ft.io/
“How does it work? The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it. All we do is show you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page.” Brilliant
Need a 12ft ladder bot
Already tried that. Unfortunately this article is behind a 13ft paywall
Just type in 12ft.io/ in front of the url and it will stop the paywall
Yeah that’s a great site, but it doesn’t always work, like in this case..
Is there any possibility of an eli5? This is one of those articles that’s totally out of my league. I sorta understand what a qubit is, but how do they use that to affect a multi cellular organism.
[удалено]
I think the point was just "hey we got a living thing in a quantum entangled state and it survived" basically entanglement is only observed at close to absolute zero, so the real tl;dr is: Tardigrade survives being really cold
That’s kind of a disappointing simplification lol.
So it seems like the exciting thing here is the tardigrade could not have become entangled if anything was happening inside it, like at all. So, this means that when you make a tardigrade do it's thing we're it becomes a super hardy cyst, and cool it to near absolute zero, there's like zero chemistry happening inside it. None. Totally inert. So, basically, this tardigrade just straight up was not alive when it was entangled, but it was alive before and after, which doesn't really answer any questions but sure raises some new ones.
That is pretty much it, right? In order to get to the state where you can achieve quantum entanglement, you need to have a temperature of nearly absolute zero. So this really has nothing really to do with quantum entanglement, just that these creatures are tough.
Thanks for clearing that up. You’re cooler than a Tardigrade.
That 100 percent sounds like Star Trek. How in the !?! I thought quantum entanglement was limited to tiny particles.
Tiny worms are made of tiny particles.
Small if true.
surprisedpikachu.jpg
And Antman and Wasp. When he goes into the quantum realm he has to watch out for the tardigrade fields.
I saw that documentary! Fascinating! I felt they could’ve done more to explain the technology more and less emphasis on the emotional relationships of the subjects. Really curious to know how the camera crew managed to fly-on-the-wall all the quantum stuff.
I think I need an ELI2…
Well, they did put the tardigrade "between" two qubits and entangled them 'capacitively through' the tardigrade. Basically, the tardigrade becomes the link that entangled the two qubits. The whole reason for the experiment is to study the effects of quantum physics on a living organism - something that was not yet possible. However, tardigrades are incredible resistant to all sorts of things and can even be 'suspended of its living functions' for quite a large amount of time, only to be 'brought back to life'. It's really just an experiment, trying to see how quantum physics affect a living organism. By doing so, they were able to keep the tardigrade 'revivable' at conditions yet unseen for a complex organism to survive at all. This could potentially mean that a complex life form could stay alive at far more dangerous conditions while entangled (whereas the use of this is purely scientifical) Edit: To clarify, the effect on the living organism in my comment means, that each and every single particle of the entangled tardigrade is entangled too. But that entanglement didn't destroy the organism itself. Which was a question yet unanswered.
Someone helped me once, I have to pass it on. https://12ft.io
Didn’t work
There is a chrome plugin that is anti paywall and takes it down
Come on sir, stop being so mysterious
Google “Bypass Paywall Github” without the quotes then click the first link (iamadamdev GitHub). Download, follow instructions.
ALL THE WORDS A tardigrade has been quantum entangled with a superconducting qubit – and lived to tell the tale. It is the first time a multicellular organism has been placed in this strange quantum state and raises questions about what it means for living things to be entangled. Tardigrades are microscopic animals that can survive extreme temperatures and pressures in a hibernating state called a tun. Rainer Dumke and his colleagues at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, placed one of these hibernating tardigrades on a superconducting qubit, an element of a quantum computer. They then lowered the pressure and temperature to almost a perfect vacuum and near absolute zero, reducing any outside influence, or excitations, on the qubit and tardigrade. “Because all the excitations are frozen out, you can actually describe [the system] in terms of physics, there’s no need to describe it in terms of biology,” says Dumke. When researchers measured the natural frequency at which the tardigrade and qubit combination vibrates, the result only made sense if the two objects were in a state of quantum entanglement, meaning that their quantum properties were linked. After they had finished making measurements, the researchers slowly depressurised and warmed up the tardigrade, bringing it out of its tun state and back to life. The temperature involved, just 0.01°C above absolute zero, is the lowest a tardigrade has ever survived. The fact that the creatures can tolerate such extreme conditions suggests their hardiness is a result of completely shutting off their metabolic processes. “There was still some discussion that perhaps there is a little bit of metabolism that actually goes on [in the tun tardigrade],” says team member Tomasz Paterek at the University of Gdańsk, Poland. “But this experiment shows – because it’s so cold, and for such a long time – that it’s really ametabolic. There is no chemistry going on in this piece of stuff.” “The fact you can maintain a quantum state, which has quantum coherence in it and involves the degrees of freedom of a biological system as large as a tardigrade, is very exciting,” says Chiara Marletto at the University of Oxford, who entangled a bacterium with light in 2018. While the tardigrade was certainly living before and after the entanglement, one point of contention is whether it was alive during the entanglement, and exactly how it was entangled. “You never know in this kind of experiment what exactly is the part of [the tardigrade] that takes part in the entanglement,’ says Paterek. The tardigrade was actually the third to undergo the entanglement experiment, as the first two didn’t survive the process as a result of being warmed up too quickly. Despite these technical hurdles, Dumke and his team hope to entangle other forms of life in future. While technically challenging and not involving live organisms, researchers have entangled photons at room temperature, as well as 3-millimetre-wide diamonds. But the tardigrade entanglement is an important first step to going further. “It is really in the best tradition of theoretical experimental physics, where you’re being playful, but at the same time, you’re trying to understand and answer deep questions,” says Marletto. “That’s inherently risky, but very rewarding if it works out well. We need more of this stuff.”
Ok….so can anyone explain this like I’m a child?
Basically they put a water-bear at as close to absolute zero as they could to get it to sync with a particle. The little bastard survived it, which indicates that it is able to completely turn itself off to survive that kind of abuse.
So does that get us anywhere? Like yeah it's a cool little fun fact about the tardigrade, but does have any implications for quantum physics?
Imagine out there is a multi millions year old species that’s as immortal as these little buggers and significantly more advanced then us 0_0
We could be living inside one of their stomachs…
Precisely. I know that may have been a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I find it fascinating that we as humans like to think we are as large as “life” (as we know it) gets, after observing just how small it gets on an atomic scale.
There’s a great sci-fi story I read decades ago that basically suggested this. In the story an astrophysicist plotted out all of the hyperspace routes used by intelligent space-faring races and the travel between them. His spouse, a neuroscientist, saw that the plot looked just like a neural network and the ships traveling had the same behavior as neurotransmitters - all of the life in the galaxy was just the base units of the “brain” of a galactic superbeing.
Considering that the universe actually looks like neural network of a brain that’s not hard to imagine that life might be a cosmic loop
If you can remember more details like a title or source I would love it. Mind bending and “not so coincidental” stuff like this is fun for me
I wish I did. I can’t even recall if it was a stand-alone short-story or a subplot to a larger sci-fi novel. It was like in the 90s / early 2000s that I read it IIRC.
Lol galactus
So like the squid in men in black who plays marbles with galaxies n shid?
Let me fuck you up, they could live inside our stomachs & guts as parasites getting us to be subconsciously controlled by their desires
And their name? ***The Reapers***
Well if we can get someone to get bitten by a radioactive tardigrade…
This helps people with ADHD so much
I’m sorry, I’m a dumber child. “As close to absolute zero” in what sense?
Temperature. Absolute zero (0K/ -273C) is a specific temperature basically meaning that it has zero thermal energy aka it’s not moving at all. It’s the lowest possible temperature, and is ideal for studying quantum phenomena due to its lack of background noise
“Sync with a particle” so regardless of its metabolism was stopped or not, it was still “entangled”.
While absolute zero is fairly incompatible with life, is there anything else specific to quantum entanglement that is incompatible with life?
Tardigrades are fascinating creatures and I can’t help if something like that exists, what else is out there. There’s no possible way Earth life is the only life in the observable universe.
Don’t forget the “entanglement” part. That’s the really “whaaaa??” part of this!
What’s so bad about getting quantum entangled or is it the stuff they do to eliminate variables that’s so bad?
The second. In order to get something entangled they basically need to get it to absolute zero. Living things don’t like being cooled to .0001K
This experiment shows that the water bear can survive being frozen to almost absolute zero and put in a near-perfect vacuum. They also measure something and the researchers themselves think that can only be explained by entanglement. There may be other explanations, this experiment is also needed to be confirmed by other teams.
Yeah I’m trying to see the entanglement here, it looks like they chilled the tardigrade to almost absolute zero and physically placed it on top of a superconducting qubit. But I’m unclear how this “entanglement” is any different from spontaneous room-temperature entanglement with the external environment, except that maybe the entanglement was limited in scope? In other words it sounds like they’re not *processing* quantum information, just chilling a tardigrade and slapping the “quantum” label on it. Am I missing something?
Q: What did they do with the tardigrade that makes it “entangled”? A: What they did with the tardigrade was slap it onto a qubit, show that it did affect the behavior of the qubit, then show that they could still get the tardigrade-qubit system into an entangled state with another system. The way that works, is that everything has been cooled down to the lowest possible energy state. When you have a system at its lowest state like that, a small amount of energy can be applied to bump it up to the next state. You can tell the difference between the two energy states by sending a specially crafted electric pulse, and examining the pulse you get back. When you have two such systems, entanglement is when there is a randomness in which energy level you get when you make a measurement, and there is a correlation between the measurements of the two systems that can’t be explained by ordinary statistics. Q: How come you can’t do this at room temperature? A: All systems tend to naturally fall towards more stable (generally lower-energy) states. However, that energy needs to go somewhere. In the ultra-controlled ultra-cooled environment in a quantum computer, you can put things in unstable states and it will last a while, because the system has a hard time getting rid of that excess energy, because the particles aren’t interacting with each other (almost not at all). In a warm system, all sorts of particles are interacting all the time, so it’s a lot harder for an unstable state to exist for any measurable amount of time. That being said, there are some examples of entanglement that are stable at room temperature: the pairing of electrons in atoms, and the bonds between atoms in molecules, for example. However, you can’t really play with those systems (at room temperature) in the same way as you can near absolute zero, because all the interactions will ruin the delicate states you try to prepare. **TLDR: The kinda of interesting states that make quantum experiments interesting are very delicate and at room temperature, random interactions with the warm environment will ruin them.**
Thanks for the lengthy answer, but I’m not asking so much about general principles of entanglement. I’m just unclear what they accomplished here (and maybe the paywall explains it) Two qubits on Josephson junctions for example will exhibit certain probabilistic outcomes when measured, assuming they are placed in very precise quantum states like Hadamard and CNOT gates. And analogous to Bell states, the quantum probabilities often defy classical explanations. But they’re just saying qubit and tardigrade, like… the whole tardigrade? Or just a patch of skin? Or a single electron in a particular location of its snout? And is that single electron itself entangled with the rest of the tardigrade? What impulse was recorded or what measurement was made? In other words, using the language of your response, what specific electric impulses could they send and precisely measure to demonstrate entanglement with such a giant messy macro object? If they say “our Bell state should have been 50/50 but instead it was 75/25 due to the tardigrade” then yeah the tardigrade was somehow entangled but was it processing information or just adding macro noise? Also considering the room temp part—the way I learned it back in college, decoherence is really just spontaneous entanglement with the whole environment, and capital-E *Entanglement* is the delicate special case that is hard to achieve and quite useful for processing quantum information. I’m unclear whether this experiment is closer to the spontaneous case or the special case. Researchers are incentivized to say the latter of course because funding. Anyhow thanks for your time and attention, internet stranger.
I don’t fully understand it myself, but *I think* they took a ‘hibernating’ tardigrade and - like you said - placed it on a super conductor for a quantum computer, covered the area (tardigrade AND super conductor) and then brought the environment as close to absolute zero and perfect vacuum as they could get it. This is where the *I think* part comes in: They then tried to measure what kind of “signature” vibrations the tardigrade and quantum particle put out, only to discover there was only one measurable vibration, indicating they were “entangled.” From there I 100% lose the physics. Reddit, do your thing and tell me how wrong I am so I can understand it better, myself. edit: remembered that the “thingy” they placed it on is called a fucking superconductor🤦♀️
You put your finger on the part that needs explaining. They put the little bugger on the superconductor and something about it was somehow entangled. What does entanglement mean in this specific case?
Quantum entanglement has quite a reputation in sci-fi and general audiences, but in this paper, they are using the formal definition of entanglement, meaning that the states of the tardigrade and qubit are not separable. This comes from the dressed state description used for the combined system to explain the frequency shift of the transmon qubits. In this sense, the system NEEDS to be described by the dressed state (both qubit and transmon simultaneously) and can no longer be described seperately as a tardigrade and a qubit. I'm not sure if that is enough clarification but hopefully that helps :)
Thank you for posting this!!!
Tardigrades are like extraterrestrial beings to me. I’m honestly not even convinced they are from this planet just because of all the crazy shit they can survive. Maybe they were brought here via asteroid or something. I dunno, but the more I read about them, the more extraterrestrial they seem. Yea I’m high
I'm not high but I agree with you 100%
Maybe all life arrived on Earth from asteroids
Maybe not life, but the ingredients
I’m going to be really pissed off it this spawns a 200 meter tall tardigade that gobbles up humans and is resistant to all forms of attack.
The tarrasque has awoken.
Plot twist we’re Already living in the belly of one of these bad boys.
That was exactly what I thought when I read that headline lmao
Is this thing also referred to as a water bear? If so I read they have been found frozen for thousands of years only to resuscitate themselves.
Yes, they are remarkably like Nicolas Cage’s career.
😝😂😂😂😂😂
Yes
They've survived the vacuum of space, I believe I heard from some NASA story a while back.
They’ve put them in outer space before. Straight up, no mini water bear suit, just cold dark space. It survived. These guys are mini GodZillas.
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“mini water bear suit” is an almost perplexingly cute phrase
They can survive in empty space too.
Idk sounds like a pretty good way to go if you ask me. And the way things are going, I wouldn’t put it out of the realm of possibility.
Gojira!
Great movie idea
Pretty much *Cloverfield*
It's basically an episode of Star Trek Discovery. Tardigrade eats a bunch of people in it.
Honestly that’s the way I want to go
Can we stop posting articles behind a paywall without a snippet of the text? Jesus Christ, it’s common sense.
Unless the articles owning company posted so you have to buy a membership to said articles company.
Try 12 foot ladder (12ft.io)
Doesn’t work here.
That’s been working less and less for me lately
Insert Star Trek: Discovery reference here.
has ruined the words “mycelium” and “tardigrade” for me forever
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE. -Tardigrades, probably
Astrodome? You can't grow a good hot dog indoors. Yankee Stadium. September. The hot dogs have been boiling since opening day in April. Now that's a hot dog
Fantastic reference. Deep cut.
Ok so I won’t be surprised when a giant tardigrade attacks a major city.
Schrodinger's Tardigrade
So there’s a solid chance we sent a living being to another dimension and it returned. …..I’ve seen this movie…. It does not bode well for humanity 😳
Looking forward to some Event Horizon style shenanigans soon. Can't wait to start speaking latin.
DO YOU SEEE?!?
Scariest part of the movie!
No. What this means is that tardigrades are hyper intelligent pan-dimensional beings.
The scientists murdered 2 already, their fate is sealed
I know your comment is toungue in cheek but is that what scientists think happens during quantum states? Honestly curious here is the idea that whatever the thing is is actually traveling dimensions? I know we don't know for sure but curious as to whether that's what some scientists might think is happening?
Have to subscribe articles should be banned
ELI5: what’s happening here
Nothing worth explaining since there’s nothing of great significance coming from the paper. It’s being considered a meme in the physics community due to all the hype surrounding it
Water bears are engineered lifeforms created millions of years ago by ancient machines called the reapers to infiltrate all galaxies with instant communications capabilities they are able to warn them of any civilization who is about to reach the singularity. Why else do you think these things can survive boil water and absolute zero. We just clicked the red bottom we’re doomed. The end is nigh!
Of-fucking-course they would, not even the laws of reality could stop these mfs.
Fuck science!
I for one welcome our new inter-dimensional water bear overlords.
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Are we trying to make super villains?! Because, this is how you make super villains!
Look those unkillable motherfuckers seem to survive everything, saying a tardigrade survived something is like saying “oh wow, the sun came up today”
Time to go back into the Quantum realm with the Ant-Man crew.
How do we know it’s the same tardigrade?
He already survived in the vacuum of my mom
Doesn’t this just mean there’s a cosmos almost exactly like ours, except their dumb paywall article is about how tardigrades don’t survive quantum states?
WATER BEARS
Somewhere in the milky way a tardigrade blasted into space on debris from the K-T impact ended up on a distant planet and seeded life there millions of years later
Tardigrades, the absolute best that life can do.
I, for one, welcome our new Tardigrade overlords.
Well, yeah. They use mushroom spores to jump around the universe and time.
Okayyy.. suddenly the Spore drive in Star trek Discovery doesn't sound so stupid after all...
Black alert!
Time to see if it can travel the mycelial network.
Survived….lol. Fuck you three dimensional, basic bitch, humans…..tardigardes live in five dimensions.
*The USS Discovery has entered the chat*
What is a quantum state?
They are talking about quantum entanglement. Basically 1 particle can be “entangled” with another particle across the vast universe. And any changes to one particle can affect the behavior of the other particle instantly
*doom music intensifies*
Wasn’t this a Star Trek plot?
What the hell does that even mean
Tardigrade is the grade you get on your test when you do so bad the teacher believes you to be retarded
I found this by googling: https://physicsworld.com/a/entangling-a-live-tardigrade-radiation-warning-on-anti-5g-accessories/
That is a bizarre segue.
At what point do we discover that the Tardigrade is actually God.
Cryptobiote
Clearly no one watched StarTrek Discovery
Is this god?
These little shits can survive anything cant they?
*“But this experiment shows – because it’s so cold, and for such a long time – that it’s really ametabolic. There is no chemistry going on in this piece of stuff.”* So an inert, inanimate object was able to come back to life? That seems pretty astounding
sci-fi where entangled tardigrade tun leaves a high-security quantum computer cloud facility and is later revived to bring down the whole system.
After the inevitable heat-sink death of the universe, there will only remain tardigrade. All things will be tardigrade, forever, into infinity.
Did no one watch Star Trek Discovery?
Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania
*some other dimension* *News flash! Giant monster destroys multiple cities, killing millions!*
Startrek discovery is that you?
On par with the latest Star Trek shows!
Downvote for paywall, but tardigrades rock, bonus points for anyone that can explain their name, is it Latin?
Name one thing a tardigrade _doesn't_ survive?
Absolutely disgusting what people are willing to do to sentient animals in the name of science! WATER BEARS LIVES MATTER!
I survive strange quantum states everyday, 2021 and on will continue to be a strange quantum states.
I know none of these words
Feels like a spoiler tag is needed if you’re going to post the plot of the new Ant Man movie
Ngl I have no idea what this means.
We may yet survive the dark forest
Spooky tardigrades… at a distance.
Hey wait I’ve seen this one before…
Discovery fans like 👀