In which I string together a series of videos, links and text that use Mario as a base for Science. First is Mario and the Many World Interpretation of Quantum Physics

…So what’s this about quantum physics? Oh, right. Well, I kind of identify the branching-paths effect in the video with the Everett-Wheeler “Many Worlds Interpretation” of quantum physics. Quantum physics does this weird thing where instead of things being in one knowable place or one knowable state, something that is quantum (like, say, an electron) exists in sort of this cloud of potentials, where there’s this mathematical object called a wavefunction that describes the probabilities of the places the electron might be at a given moment. Quantum physics is really all about the way this wavefunction behaves. There’s this thing that happens though where when a quantum thing interacts with something else, the wavefunction “collapses” to a single state vector and the (say) electron suddenly goes from being this potential

A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.

Andrew Cleland at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his team cooled a tiny metal paddle until it reached its quantum mechanical 'ground state' — the lowest-energy state permitted by quantum mechanics. They then used the weird rules of quantum mechanics to simultaneously set the paddle moving while leaving it standing still. The experiment shows that the principles of quantum mechanics can apply to everyday objects as well as as atomic-scale particles.

The work is simultaneously being published online today in Nature and presented today at the American Physical Society's meeting in Portland, Oregon1.