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Comment by peignoir | Hacker News Reader

My very light understanding of quantum physics is that it does not really translate in words. It s like trying to explain what’s apple times i in English.

That being said the standard model is very good at predicting outcomes at a small scale. The issue with gravity is things where General relativity applies need to be huge to be observe. If we want to find a quantum model of gravity we need to observe what gravity does at a small scale and try to fit a model within these observations. That’s why this experiment is a step in the right direction. Maybe gravity does “weird” things at a smaller scale… Back to your question we don’t know we just observe :)

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> apple times i

To be fair, Apple has been doing this (multiplying things by i) for a while now. Not that they have given any explanation why.

Steve Jobs said a long time ago, and I am paraphrasing, that a company that makes a product that has reached its maturity will eventually be taken over by advertising and data-mining. Something like that.

There's not much innovation right now in terms of personal computing devices. It's a solved problem. To show 'progress' on a year to year basis, something has to change. It used to be eSomething. Then iSomething. Now I suppose it's airSomething.

I'm not sure what comes after 'air', ordinalitly speaking.

The next progression is Something+

Is this what you Humans call, humor?

It's a complex joke

Your complex jokes will be assimilated with the rest of your pitiful meme based culture.

> My very light understanding of quantum physics is that it does not really translate in words. It s like trying to explain what’s apple times i in English.

This is really one of the best comments I have read on an article like this ever. Having had a cursory introduction to quantum physics in math terms and not understanding much of it, I find it impossible to read any sort of popular science literature on the subject. It's always going to be a very vague description with analogies that raise more questions than give answers. That's not to say I don't applaud the effort of quantum physicists to explain it to a broader public- I just think that most of the time they come away thinking it's some sort of black magic rather than solid science.

A book about QM by Zagoskin is one of the more recent attempts to be open and honest in this regard. It is packed with math.

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