Aaron O'Connell Explains His Quantum Object

...happily the terms he uses are identical to the ones I used in my recent essay. It's a macro scale object, as large compared with regular quantum objects as a human is from it. It's a tiny “diving board,” that's how he describes it.

I was struck by something I hadn't heard before, which was that before they ran the experiment (I talk about it on this blog) they observed the little sliver “breathing.” It was already in a quantum state...

This adds major empirical muscle, by the way, to the theory of motion I'm going to endorse in Realist Magic. We think motion is pretty straightforward (that's almost a pun), but it's actually incredibly strange and involves all kinds of paradoxes. Most philosophers aren't happy with these but when they edit them out, they introduce brittleness into the metalanguage, and that results in even worse paradoxes...