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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

Heh. It's interesting to me that in the vernacular a quantum leap is a large change while in physics it's a very quick, extremely tiny event.

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No! This meme is just wrong (and it does grind my gears to an unreasonable amount as a physicist). In physics quantum means discrete, it does not mean small. Hence the idiom "quantum leap" used as "a discontinuous abrupt jump in quality" is perfectly in sync with the way physicists use the phrase.

I'm not saying it means small, just that quantum leaps are nanoscale. And also, the state after the leap isn't better or worse than the state before, just different.

I still disagree. Quantum does not imply nanoscale - we are building bigger and bigger systems that exhibit inherently quantum behavior (for instance superconducting cavities used in quantum computing research are centimeter scale). Moreover, the jump is not necessarily in a spatial variable - it can be a very big jump in energy levels for instance, which is the case with laser emissions.

Sure, a (big or small) discrete jump does not necessarily imply a jump to something better, but that has little to do with my complaint about the meme that "quantum implies small".

I stand corrected. Thank you.

No, in both it's a discrete change. It just happens to be that in physics most discrete changes are at a small scale.

Maybe it's a clue that Mozillians are secretly building a handlink:

http://quantumleap.wikia.com/wiki/Handlink

"Although changes of quantum state occur on the sub-microscopic level, in popular discourse, the term "quantum leap" refers to a large increase.[5]"

Isn't that more or less what I said?

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