Ever see a science headline that you’re damn sure was constructed by sci-fi writers on a deadline? I’m pretty sure they just threw ‘quantum’ onto this one and called it a day.
Today’s Moment of Science… Quantum tardigrades.
Second only to the cat, these microscopic moss piglets are perhaps the internet’s favorite critters. And similarly to cats, their behavior defies explanation, they have at least nine lives, and I’m not entirely unconvinced of their divinity. German zoologist Johann August Ephraim Goeze discovered the wee critters in 1773, calling them little water bears. A few years later Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani thought they had the most adorable little shuffle. He named them ‘tardigradum,’ roughly translating from Latin to ‘slow walkers.’
Fully grown tardigrades are typically about half a millimeter long but can sometimes grow up to a whole 2mm. At this size, the nanopig is technically big enough to be seen with the naked eye. Being virtually transparent though, you’d have to catch them under the right lighting after they’ve eaten a big burrito. The highly detailed pictures we’re familiar with are taken by fancy pants scanning electron microscopes; the buggers can also be viewed with the type of low power microscopy affordable to hobbyists.
Estimated to have been around for as long as 500 million years, they’ve had plenty of time to get- technical term- utterly goddamn whackadoodle. Thriving comfortably through five mass extinction events is a feat that a few other critters have managed, suggesting the tardigrade is packing apocalypse level survival advantages. Over 1,300 species of tardigrades have been identified and the details vary, but our water bear overlords can survive heat, cold, gamma radiation, and the motherfucking vacuum of space.
The little fuckers are damn near indestructible.
So, quantum stuff.
A quick refresher in case we haven’t all become experts from my, uh, two articles on quantum physics. TL;DR, when shit is super tiny, the rules that govern the physical universe as we intuitively understand them are all but thrown out the window. Itsy bits of universe give very few fucks about classical physics.
Want to know exactly what a subatomic particle is doing? Learn to settle for finding out what it’s probably doing. Particles like electrons are described mathematically by wave functions. Amongst other things, this allows us to understand the probability of finding a particle at a given location. Quantum entanglement occurs when more than one particle interacts in such a way that they share a wave function. It’s all one system, which can be used for some interesting and downright spooky science (most of which is for another article).
So how do you stick a tardigrade into… that?
Freeze it, toss it into some quantum circuitry, observe. Science!
That was more or less the description from the spectacular mess of a pre-print that came out in December of 2021. The experiment involved chilling a tardigrade to a smidge above absolute zero, putting it into a qubit (quantum computing bit), entangling the qubit-tardigrade cake with a tardigrade-free qubit, and getting all that attention the researchers were looking for.
Cool story, the super cold tardigrade reportedly induced a change in the resonance frequency of the qubit it was sandwiched into. That system then appeared to change the frequency of the qubit it was entangled with. So… entangled tardigrade, yeah?
Eh.
The paper has received a larger balance of criticism than praise from experts. It’s been pointed out that the tardigrade, being mostly water, likely had one of those dirty old classical physics effects on the qubit.
Yes indeed, there was an interaction with the quantum bit. But it almost certainly wasn’t the start of a new Marvel franchise. It was, at best, good old electromagnetism.
In a feat representing possibly the biggest breakthrough of the entire experiment, one tardigrade survived being frozen to less than a degree above absolute zero.
This has been your Moment of Science, reminding you that on the internet, nobody knows you’re a quantum tardigrade.
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