Science

THIS ARTICLE IS DEDICATED TO MY COLLEAGUE MATTHEW COBB, WHO IS BEING DRIVEN CRAZY BY UNHINGED PIECES ON “DE-EXTINCTING” THE WOOLY MAMMOTH

The push to re-create the extinct Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) may be the biggest waste of money in decades, and for several reasons. First, the people behind this are misleading the public by making us think that they’re going to give us a real woolly mammoth instead of a hairy and (perhaps) cold-tolerant Asiatic elephant, which is what they’re really trying to make. It doesn’t help that credulous and ignorant journalists can’t even see through this.

Second, the endeavor to even make a hairy elephant (they propose to put manufactured mammoth genes with sequences derived from frozen mammoths, into a fertilized elephant egg, and then implant it into an
Asiatic elephant), faces so many obstacles that it seems nearly impossible. And even if it were possible, you’d need to make at least two faux mammoths so they could create a lineage. And where would they live, since real woolly mammoths were denizens of the chilly tundras of northern Asia? (That’s why they had hair.) What would they eat? Asiatic elephants don’t eat the kind of stuff on the tundra, and aren’t equipped to process it, but they’re not going to change behavior and physiology genes.

As I reported yesterday, this ridiculous project is making the news again because, yes, scientists have created a “woolly mouse” by injecting nine genes known to influence hair color and texture IN MICE into mouse stem cells and implanting the lot in mice. They got fuzzier mice, but apparently not the ones shown below, which are in the press release. What they really got are mice less hairier than those shown in the press (see below).

Of course, you can also breed mice that look like this, but we can’t breed Asiatic elephants, though that would be more likely to produce a faux mammoth, because their generation time is too long.  And, as I said, it’s a hell of a lot easier to make transgenic mice than transgenic elephants.  As one wag tweeted about this ludicrous experiment on mice, which is supposed to be a precursor to the Mammoth Project:

GIVE THEM TRUNKS YOU COWARDSwww.theguardian.com/science/2025…

— Marc Dionne (@marcsdionne.bsky.social) 2025-03-04T18:05:25.420Z

. . . AND BIG TUSKS, TOO!

Both Matthew and I have criticized this project for its pretended aims as well as its impossibility (see my posts here, as especially this one), and Matthew is getting depressed at how many journalists have been taken in by the project, now in the hands of Colossal Biosciences (a “de-extinction” company), but most famously promoted by Harvard’s George Church, the founder of Colossal (curiously, Elon Musk had a hand in convincing Church to take this on). In fact, Matthew devotes a big section of his book As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age, to debunking the Mammoth Project.

Now Scientific American, which I hoped would recover from its years of benighted wokeness, has taken up the story. (Click below to read, or find it archived here.)

How did the magazine do? (The author is journalist Adam Popescu and the editor is Andrea Thompson, “covering the environment, energy and earth sciences”.) Well, on first reading I’d give it a C. It does point out some problems to worry about after we produce a woolly mammoth, but is quite thin about whether they can get one in the first place.  For example, it doesn’t even note that an Asian elephant with a few genes that make it hairy and (perhaps) cold-tolerant is nothing like a Woolly Mammoth, separated by about 6.5 million years of evolution. (That’s about the time separating us from chimps and bonobos.) It is a hairy elephant with no behaviors that would help it survive on the tundra.  And they don’t even mention the problems of implanted a genetically altered elephant embryo back into a female Asiatic elephant. Here’s what I wrote in one post (the quote within is from the NYT):

Further, a lot of other genes differ between a mammoth and an Asian elephant. What guarantee is there that the inserted mammoth genes would be expressed correctly, or even work at all in concert with the Asian elephant developmental system?

But it gets worse. Since you can’t implant a transgenic embryo into an elephant mom (we don’t know how to do that, and we would get just one or two chances), Church had this bright idea:

Initially, Dr. Church envisioned implanting embryos into surrogate female elephants. But he eventually soured on the idea. Even if he could figure out in vitro fertilization for elephants — which no one has done before — building a herd would be impractical, since he would need so many surrogates.

Instead, Dr. Church decided to make an artificial mammoth uterus lined with uterine tissue grown from stem cells. “I’m not making a bold prediction this is going to be easy,” he said. “But everything up to this point has been relatively easy. Every tissue we’ve gone after, we’ve been able to get a recipe for.”

The idea has a few precedents. At the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, researchers have developed a sealed bag that can support a fetal lamb for four weeks, for example. But Colossal will need to build an artificial uterus big enough to house a fetus for around two years, reaching a weight of 200 pounds.

An artificial mammoth uterus? Seriously? If you think that’s gonna work, I have some land in Florida I’d like to sell you. Of course, if you’re going to breed these things, you’d have to make two of them of opposite sexes. Could they even do that?

That, in fact, is another huge problem beyond problem beyond the pretense that they are going to put a lot of mammoth-derived or mammoth-mimicking genes in an elephant and call it a Woolly Mammoth. An artificial womb for a baby elephant would be the size of a Volkswagen!  Scientific American doesn’t mention that problem, either.

Finally, the Colossal researchers apparently also inserted a gene thought to affect mouse lipid metabolism into the mouse (Nature, in the article below, doesn’t mention it), but the Sci. Am. article says in the second paragraph that the Woolly Mice have “cold adapted traits such as the way in which it sotres and burns fat”.  That is a lie. They don’t know whether the gene does that in the mice, and later on Sci. Am. gives the real story:

The team also targeted lipid metabolism, “which is the process by which the body breaks down, synthesizes and stores fats,” Shapiro says. The paper notes that “future experiments will examine the effect of high fat diets and temperature preferences” on the mice to inform further work toward the goal of developing cold-adapted elephant-mammoth hybrids.

So no, the mice are not cold adapted. (See below, too.)

The problems that Sci Am does mention involve mostly things about about the environment and conservation, perhaps prompted by the editor. And they are real problems, but won’t even need to be considered until we get one of these mammoths (the NBC Evening News on Tuesday said that Colossal envisions the Mammoth Release in 2028, which is pure bunk). Below are problems Sci. Am. lists, but they’re all problems that would arise if they created the faux mammoth and then put it into the wild. These are quotes:

But many experts in genetic engineering and conservation are skeptical. Rewilding is risky; species such as wolves and elephants have come into conflict with humans, and others have fallen victim to predators and poachers. No one knows what would happen if a mammoth—or, more technically, an elephant-mammoth hybrid—was released: What would it eat? How would we protect it? Could it reproduce?

. . . . As for saving the climate, “we’re looking at a warming world, and [Colossal’s researchers] want to bring back creatures that are adapted to the cold?” says Elsa Panciroli, a paleontologist at National Museums Scotland, who studies ancient mice-sized mammals. “I study animals from the past, and they should stay in the past. Lack of habitat, human conflict, agriculture, climate change—the idea that they can fix that with gene editing is missing the big picture.”

. . . “In certain ancient species’ DNA, you don’t know what the function of this DNA is, so there are more than ethical problems; there are biological hazards from moving and editing the DNA,” says Yale University geneticist Jiangbing. Zhou “I’m not sure about the potential risks of this type of work, as the function of ancient DNA in live mice may be difficult to predict.”

. . . What happens with the mice or—if the company ever realizes its ultimate ambition—the woolly mammoths is another ethical quandary. “I feel like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, but if we’re going to interfere with nature, there has to be good reason,” Panciroli says. Additionally, reintroduced animals (including elephants) are routinely targeted by poachers, points out Andrea Crosta, founder of a wildlife-crime-fighting nongovernment organization called Earth League International.

. . .“It’s arrogance,” says Sue Lieberman, vice president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society, who spent decades fighting whaling and the ivory trade. “I’m not against technology. I’m not saying nature’s perfect. But this is such a waste of money when conservation is dying for lack of funds. To make some strange animal we can gawk at—we should be past that.”

Trailblazing biologist George Schaller agrees. “We need to protect what we have,” he says.

I think I’ll downgrade the grade I give to Sci. Am. to a D, for they completely omit the problems of making anything that resembles a Woolly Mammoth, and then point out problems that would arise if we could and then unleashed them on the tundra. They should have mentioned, as Nature implies below, that the whole project is simply bonkers and will not succeed. (If they do, I’ll eat my hat.) And Sci Am show pictures of hairy mice which are NOT the mice created by Colossal (see below).  Showing those photos borders on duplicity!

Nature, as you can tell by the headline below, does a much better job of pointing out the problems, though it doesn’t mention the Uterus Difficulty or the Behavior and Foraging Difficulty. I give the article an A-, though, because it does say that Colossal isn’t going to produce a woolly mammoth. Click to read:

They point out the main problem in the third through fifth paragraphs:

Colossal, which is based in Dallas, Texas, and is worth more than US$10 billion according to its latest valuation, says the woolly mouse represents an important step towards its goal of engineering Asian elephants — the mammoth’s closest living relative — with genetic changes for key mammoth traits. “The Colossal Woolly Mouse marks a watershed moment in our de-extinction mission,” said Ben Lamm, Colossal’s co-founder and chief executive, in the press release.

But some experts in mammoth genetics and genome editing question whether the mice represent a significant advance in either area, let alone a milestone on the way to bringing back woolly mammoths, which last roamed Earth some 4,000 years ago.

“It’s far away from making a mammoth or a ‘mammoth mouse’,” says Stephan Riesenberg, a genome engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “It’s just a mouse that has some special genes.”

And note that Colossal created some of their fuzzy mice by inserting into the mice genome not genes derived from mammoth sequences, but mouse mutations already known to make mice hairier. It’s a scam!

Shapiro [from Colossal] defends the decision to include mouse-specific mutations in Colossal’s woolly mice, in part because of the genetic chasm that separates mice and mammoths. “We have to choose modifications that are going to be compatible with healthy animals,” Shapiro says. “We’re not shoving mammoth genes into mice because there’s 200 million years of evolutionary distance between them.”

It’s not clear how many genetic changes would be needed to imbue elephants with mammoth traits. Lamm says Colossal’s goal isn’t to create an exact replica of mammoths, but a creature that can fill the ecological niches that mammoths occupied. “It’s really about rebuilding extinct species for today and looking for lost biodiversity and lost genes that drive those phenotypes.”

Making eight changes to an organism’s genome, as the Colossal team did, is now fairly standard in genetic engineering, Riesenberg says.

Riesenberg and his colleagues are developing methods to introduce dozens, or even hundreds, of Neanderthal-specific changes into human stem cells — to identify the biology that makes humans unique (“One cannot and should not recreate the Neanderthal,” he stresses). Altering an animal’s genome on this scale is one of the great frontiers in genome editing, Riesenberg adds. Even the capacity to make this many changes “would not bring you close to making a mammoth”.

Clearly Nature isn’t enthusiastic about this project, and they shouldn’t be. Even the woolly mice they show are not from their study (see below), but that took another scientist to point that out.

As Dr. Victoria Herridge points out below, they didn’t get the hairy mice shown in the journalism (and press-release) photos by combining the genes they said they inserted into the mouse. Instead, they appear to have inserted other genes already known to cause hairiness in mice, for because people have been breeding hairy “fancy mice” for years. The “mammothiest mouse” produced by Colossal is not the one shown in the pictures.

And so we have the BlueSky threads below from Dr. Victoria Herridge at the University of Sheffield, a paleontologist who studies real mammoths.  She simply takes the Colossal report apart, noting that the hairy mouse pictures used in Sci Am. do not show show the result of combined gene insertions used by the researchers, but some other mutations. Further, she notes that there’s no known effect of the “fat metabolism” genes on fat metabolism of the transgenic mice.  As Matthew adds, “note that the key experiment changing fat metabolism genes HAD NO EFFECT though they said little about that in the paper and the journalists all skipped over it…”

Here’s the hairiest mice that the Colossal people really produced by multiple insertions. They aren’t the ones in the picture above; they’re much more clean-cut! Note her comment on the inefficacy of the fat-metabolism gene.

 

Here Tori shows that Colossal should have used other mouse mutants to confect the mammoth story. Look at the double mutant Fgfr1/2!!!!

Finally, she tried to track down where the mice in all the magazines and the press release came from (the original BioRχiv paper is here).   These mice are in the supplementary materials in the article’s preprint, but involve fewer mutations than the ones touted as “mammothyt mice”:

I asked Matthew if he had ever seen any article in the popular press (beyond what’s in his book) that provided an accurate critical analysis of the Mammoth Project. He said, “no”.  As the warden said in the movie Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Science journalism is, by and large, abysmal, though of course there are exceptions.

Finally, some humor from Dr. Cobb, who’s been beleaguered by science journalists about this for years, and always tells them that the project is dumb:

He’s dreaming of eating those damned woolly mice.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-03-04T20:25:24.966Z

Skeptics love to bring up one particular topic regarding long-term human space exploration - radiation. So far, all of the research completed on it has been relatively limited and has shown nothing but harmful effects. Long-term exposure has been linked to an increase in cancer, cataracts, or even, in some extreme cases, acute radiation poisoning, an immediate life-threatening condition. NASA is aware of the problem and recently supported a new post-doc from MIT named Robert Hinshaw via the Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. Dr. HHinshaw'sjob over the next year will be to study the effectiveness of an extreme type of mitochondria replacement therapy to treat the long- and short-term risks of radiation exposure in space.

Coots' nests in Amsterdam are built using discarded plastic, providing a time capsule into the material's use over the past few decades

We are running out of photos from different readers, but fortunately we have several remaining installments from Robert Lang‘s trip to Brazil’s Pantanal, one of which I’ll present today. But please send in your photos!

Robert’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

Readers’ Wildlife Photos: The Pantanal, Part VIII: Birds

Continuing our mid-2025 journey to the Pantanal in Brazil, by far the largest category of observation and photography was birds: we saw over 100 different species of birds (and this was not even a birding-specific trip, though the outfitter also organizes those for the truly hard core). Here we continue working our way through the alphabetarium of common names.

Laughing falcon (Herpetotheres cachinnans):

Lesser yellow-headed vulture (Cathartes burrovianus). One of the several vultures we saw (which included the spectacular king vulture (Sarcoramphus papa), but alas, that one only at a great distance.):

Monk parakeet (Myiopsitta monachus):

Monk parakeets live in communal nests that they keep adding to, eventually resulting in gigantic snarls of branches with openings all over that are a constant hum of activity. Here’s a close-up of one, showing some of the individual nest openings within the apartment block:

Muscovy duck (Cairina moschata):

Nanday parakeet (Aratinga nenday):

And a pair of Nanday parakeets:

Orange-backed troupial (Icterus croconotus):

Peach-fronted parakeets (Eupsittula aurea). These tiny, wide-eyed birds look like play toys:

Plumbeous ibis (Theristicus caerulescens):

More birds to come.

The Moon's getting to be a popular place. Firefly's Blue Ghost touched down on March 2nd in Mare Crisium. It's the first privately built lander to land safely and begin its mission. The little spacecraft set down safely in an upright, stable position and sent back an "I'm here" signal right away.

So far, in the context of 1920s quantum physics, I’ve given you a sense for what an ultra-microscopic measurement consists of, and how one can make a permanent record of it. [Modern (post-1950s) quantum field theory has a somewhat different picture; please keep that in mind. We’ll get to it later.] Along the way I’ve kept the object being measured very simple: just an incoming projectile with a fairly definite motion and moderately definite position, moving steadily in one direction. But now it’s time to consider objects in more interesting quantum situations, and what it means to measure them.

The question for today is: what is a quantum superposition?

I will show you that a quantum superposition of two possibilities, in which the wave function of a system contains one possibility AND another at the same time, does not mean that both possibilities occur; it means that one OR the other may occur.

Instead of a projectile that has a near definite motion, as we’ve considered in recent posts, let’s consider a projectile that is in a quantum superposition of two possible near-definite motions:

• maybe it is moving to the left at a near-definite speed, or
• maybe it is moving to the right at a similar near-definite speed.

This motion is along the x-axis, the coordinate of a one-dimensional physical space. If the projectile is isolated from the rest of the world, we can write a wave function for it alone, which might initially look like

Fig. 1: The wave function of the projectile at the initial time, with two peaks about to head in opposite directions; see Fig. 2.

in which case its evolution over time will look like this:

Fig. 2: The evolution of the isolated projectile’s wave function.

Again I emphasize this is not the wave function of two particles, despite what you might intuitively guess. This is the wave function of a single particle in a superposition of two possible behaviors. For a similar example that we’ll return to in a few weeks, see this post.

Because the height and speed of the two peaks is the same, there is a left-to-right symmetry between them. We can therefore conclude, before we even start, that there’s a 50-50 chance of the particle going right versus going left. More generally, whatever we observe to the left (x<0) will happen with the same probability as what we observe to the right (x>0).

Today I will show you that even though the wave function has one peak moving to the left AND one peak moving to the right, nevertheless this wave function does not describe a projectile that is moving to the left AND moving to the right. Instead, it means that the projectile is moving to the left OR moving to the right. Superposition is an OR, not an AND. In other words, in pre-quantum language, we have either

Fig. 4: The pre-quantum view of the wave function in Figs. 1 and 2; either possibility may occur.

We never have both.

But don’t take my word for it. Let’s see how quantum physics actually works.

First Measurement: A Ball to the Left

Our first goal: to detect the projectile if it is moving to the left.

Let’s start by doing almost the same thing we did in this post, which you may want to read first in order to understand the pictures and the strategy that I’ll present below. To do this, we’ll put a measurement ball on the left, which the projectile will strike if it is moving to the left.

Since we now have a system of two objects rather than one, the space of possibilities for the system now has to be two-dimensional, to include both the position x1 of the projectile and the position x2 of the ball. This now requires us to consider a wave function for not just the projectile alone, as we did in Figs. 1 and 2, but for the projectile and the ball together. This wave function will give us probabilities for each possible arrangement of the projectile and ball — for each choice of x1 and x2.

We’ll put the ball at x2 = -1 initially — to the left of the projectile initially — so that the initial wave function looks like Fig. 4, which shows its absolute value squared as a function of x1 and x2.

Figure 4: The absolute square of the wave function for the projectile (with position x1 near zero) in a superposition of states as in Fig. 1, and the ball which stands ready at position x2=-1 (to the projectile’s left in physical space.)

This wave function has the same shape in x1 as the wave function in Fig. 1, but now centered on the line x2=-1. A collision between projectile and ball will become likely when a peak of the wave function approaches the point x1=x2=-1.

As usual, let’s try to think about this in a pre-quantum language first. If I’m right about wave functions, we have two options:

• The projectile is heading to the left and the measurement ball will react OR
• The projectile is heading to the right and the measurement ball will not react.

Since our wave function is left-to-right symmetric, each option is equally likely, and so if we do this experiment repeatedly, we should see the ball react about half the time.

Here are the two pre-quantum options shown in the usual way, with

• a picture in physical space on the left, and
• a picture of the same event in the space of possibilities on the right.

In the first possibility (Fig. 5a), the projectile moves left, strikes the ball, and the ball recoils to the left. As the ball moves to the left in physical space, the system moves down (toward more negative x2) in the space of possibilities.

Figure 5a: As viewed from physical space (left) and the space of possibilities (right), the projectile moves left and strikes the ball, after which the ball moves left. The ball thus measures the leftward motion of the projectile. The dashed orange line indicates where a collision can occur.

OR

Figure 5a: As viewed from physical space (left) and the space of possibilities (right), the projectile moves right, leaving the ball unscathed. The ball thus measures the rightward motion of the projectile. The dashed orange line indicates where a collision can occur.

In the second possibility (Fig. 5b), the projectile moves right and the ball remains unscathed; in this case, viewed in the space of possibilities, x2 remains at -1 during the entire process while x1 changes steadily toward more positive values.

What about in quantum physics? The wave function should include both options in Figs. 5a and 5b.

Here is an actual solution to the Schrödinger wave equation, showing that this is exactly what happens (and it has more details than the sketches I’ve been doing in my measurement posts, such as this one or this one.) The two peaks spread out more quickly than in my sketches (and I have consequently adjusted the vertical axis as time goes on so that the two bumps remain easily visible.) But the basic prediction is correct: there are indeed two peaks, one moving like the pre-quantum system in Fig 5a, changing direction and moving toward more negative x2, and the other moving like the pre-quantum system in Fig. 5b, moving steadily toward more positive x1.

Figure 6: Actual solution to Schrödinger’s wave equation, showing the absolute square of the wave function beginning with Fig. 4. Notice how the right-moving peak travels steadily toward more positive x1, as in Fig. 5b, while the left-moving peak shows signs of the collision and the subsequent motion of the system toward more negative x2, as in Fig. 5a.

Importantly, even though the system’s wave function displays both possibilities to us at the same time, there is no sense in which the system itself can be in both possibilities at the same time. The system has a near-50% probability of being observed to be within the first peak, near-50% probability of being observed to be within the second, and exactly 0% probability of being observed within both.

Second Measurement: A Ball to the Right

Now let’s put a ball to the right instead, at x=+1. This is a different ball from the previous (we’ll use both of them in a moment) so I’ll color it differently and call its position x3. The pre-quantum behaviors are the same as before, but with x2 replaced with x3 and with the collision happening at positive values of x1 and x3 instead of negative values of x1 and x2.

Figure 7a: As in Figure 5a, but with the orientation reversed.

OR

Figure 7b: As in Figure 5b, but with the orientation reversed.

The quantum version is just a 180-degree rotation of Fig. 6 with x2 replaced with x3.

Figure 8: The evolution of the absolute-value squared of the wave function in this case; compare to Fig. 6 and to Figs. 7a and 7b. Third Measurement: A Ball on Both Sides

But what happens if we put a ball on the left and a ball on the right? Initially the balls are at x2=-1 and x3=+1. What happens later?

Now there are four logical possibilities for what might happen:

1. The ball on the left responds while the ball on the right does not
2. The ball on the right responds while the ball on the left does not
3. Neither ball responds
4. Both balls respond

Where in the space of possibilities do these four options lie? The four logical possibilities listed above would put the ball’s positions in these four possible places:

• Option 1: x2 < -1 and x3 = +1 (and x1 negative, as in Fig. 5a)
• Option 2: x2 = -1 and x3 > +1 (and x1 positive, as in Fig. 7a)
• Option 3: x2 = -1 and x3 = +1 (and x1 is ???)
• Option 4: x2 < -1 and x3 > +1 (and x1 is ???)

The fact that it is not obvious where to put x1 in the last two options should already make you suscpicious; but just setting their x1 to zero for now, let’s draw where these four options occur in the space of possibilities. In Fig. 9 I’ve drawn the lines x2=-1 and x3=+1 across the box, with option 3 at their crossing point. Option 1 lies below down and to the left of option 3; option 2 is found to the rigt of option 3; and option 4 is found down and to the right.

Figure 9: Where the four options are located, roughly speaking. The lines cross at the location x2=-1, x3=+1. If I’m right, only the two cases where one ball moves will have any substantial probability.

What does the wave function actually do? Can the simple two-humped superposition at the start, analogous to Fig. 4, end up four-humped?

Not in this case, anyway. Fig. 10, which depicts the peaks of the absoulte-value-squared of the wave function only, shows the output of the Schrödinger equation. Compare the result to Fig. 9; there are peaks only for options 1 and 2, in which one ball moves and the other does not.

Figure 10: A plot showing where the absolute-value squared of the wave function is largest as the wave function evolves. The axes are as in Fig. 9. Initially the two peaks move in opposite directions parallel to the x1 axis; then, after the projectile collides with one ball or the other, one peak moves down (to more negative x2) and the other to the right (more positive x3). These correspond to the expected options when one and only one ball moves; see Fig. 9.

With balls on either side of it, the projectile cannot avoid hitting one of them, whether it goes right or left, which rules out option 3. And the wave function does not put a peak at option 4, showing there’s no way the projectile can cause both balls to move. The two peaks in the wave function move only in the x1 direction as the projectile goes left OR right; then the projectile collides with one ball OR the other; then the ball with which it collided moves, meaning that the system moves to more negative x2 (i.e. down in Fig. 10) OR to more positive x3 (i.e. to the right in Fig. 10), just as expected from Fig. 9.

Actually it’s not difficult to get the third option — but we don’t need quantum physics for that!

We simply change the original wave function to contain three possibilities: the projectile moves left, or it moves right, or it doesn’t move at all. If it doesn’t move at all, then neither ball will react, a third option even in pre-quantum physics:

If the projectile were isolated, we would encode this notion in a wave function which looks like this:

and when we include the two balls we would see the wave function with three peaks, one sitting still at the point marked “Neither Ball Moves” in Fig. 9. But this isn’t particularly exciting or surprising, since it’s intuitively obvious that a stationary projectile won’t hit either ball.

Every Which Way

There simply is no wave function you can choose — no initial superposition for the single projectile — which can cause the projectile to collide with both balls. The equations will never let this happen, no matter what initial wave function you feed into them. It’s impossible… because a superposition is an OR, not an AND. There is no way to make the projectile go left AND right — not if it’s a particle in 1920s quantum physics, anyway.

Yes, the wave function itself can have peaks that appear at to be in several places at the same time within the space of possibilities, as in Figs. 6, 8, and 10. But the wave function is not the physical system. The wave function tells us about the probabilities for the system’s possibilities; its peaks are just indicating what the most likely possibilities are.

The system itself can only realize one of the many possibilities — it can only be found (through a later measurement) in one place within the space of possibilities. This is always true, even though the wave function for the system highlights all the most probable possibilities simultaneously.

A particle, in the strict sense of the term, is an object with a position and a momentum, even though we cannot know both perfectly at any moment, thanks to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. It can only be measured to be in one place, or can only be measured to be traveling in one direction, at a time. In 1920s quantum physics, these statements apply to an electron, which is viewed as a strict particle, and so it cannot go in two directions at once, nor can it be in two places at once. The fact that we are always somewhat ignorant of where an electron is and/or where it is going, and the fact that quantum physics puts ultimate limitations on our ability to know both simultaneously, do not change these basic conceptual lessons… the lessons of (and for) the 1920s.

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"Journalist" Paul Thacker defends Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and the Great Barrington Declaration by rehashing the same old deceptive rhetoric.

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A team of researchers created Morpho, an open-source programmable environment that enables researchers and engineers to conduct shape optimization and design for soft materials. Applications can be for anything from artificial hearts to robot materials that mimic flesh and soft tissue.

A team of researchers created Morpho, an open-source programmable environment that enables researchers and engineers to conduct shape optimization and design for soft materials. Applications can be for anything from artificial hearts to robot materials that mimic flesh and soft tissue.

Researchers have explored the interplay between gravitational effects and quantum interactions in optical atomic clocks, revealing more about quantum entanglement in precision timekeeping.

Within the next decade, space agencies plan to bring samples of rock from Mars to Earth for study. Of concern is the possibility these samples contain life, which could have unforeseen consequences. Therefore, researchers in this field strive to create methods to detect life. Researchers have now successfully demonstrated a method to detect life in ancient rocks analogous to those found on Mars.

Research has achieved a breakthrough in eco-friendly display technology, creating highly efficient and stable blue quantum dot LEDs (QLEDs) that could power the next generation of televisions, smartphones, VR headsets and energy-efficient lighting -- without using toxic heavy metals.

Research has achieved a breakthrough in eco-friendly display technology, creating highly efficient and stable blue quantum dot LEDs (QLEDs) that could power the next generation of televisions, smartphones, VR headsets and energy-efficient lighting -- without using toxic heavy metals.

Sea ice cover in both the Antarctic and Arctic remained far below average throughout February as global average temperatures linger near record highs

Cutting edge technology may come with downsides.

A new seismic study of Singapore could guide urban growth and renewable energy development in the coastal city nation, where 5.6 million residents live within an area of 734 square kilometers.