Engineering Alert: Quantum Logic Gate

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have managed to create a logic gate out of individual artificial atoms, opening up the possibility of building functional, real-world quantum computer circuits.

Until now, this has been a near-impossibility, because it involves reliably creating a logic gate--something inherently logical, obviously--by using an inherently illogical quantum state quirk call entanglement. It's one of those things in quantum mechanics (as with almost everything in quantum mechanics, if fact), that have multiple interpretations, but it is definitely a real and observable phenomenon. The most famously accepted interpretation is the Copenhagen, advanced by Bohr and Heisenberg, but it has a number of counter-intuitive assumptions that hinder it. The most controversial, that the very act of passive observation changes the observed object (called non-probalisitic conversion), prompted Einstein to famously tell Neils Bohr, "God doesn't play dice."

In any event, this is a Rather Big Deal, so congrats to the guys at NIST--whether God is at the craps table or not.