[thisrod]

So this is me. A decade ago, I would have been a plausible choice of referee for a paper like this.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=C6BzRwwAAAAJ

You'll have to take my word for it, as I don't currently have a university job. For some reason, Google doesn't let you authenticate your Scholar account with your ORCID account, even though they trust ORCID to verify that you wrote the papers.

This paper sounds legitimate to me. If it was made up, it would be a fraud, not a spoof. That's unlikely, because the authors come from the most legitimate institutions there are (The University of Oxford, The National University of Singapore). ArXiv verifies institutional affiliation. Even if it is made up, the experiment is plausible.

I can get how it sounds like a spoof. I laughed out loud at:

> We simulate the electric fields and capacitance shifts using ANSYS Maxwell where the tardigrade is modelled as a cube of length 100μm

I.e, they literally assume a cubical tardigrade in a vacuum!

Actually, I did present this experiment as a spoof, at a physics department O-week camp 20 years ago. I think we used a monkey instead of a tardigrade. It was as lame as it sounds.

> My favorite laugh line from the paper: "Maximum likelihood estimation was then employed to prevent the resulting density matrix from having nonphysical properties."

What they did is totally legitimate. Reconstructing density matrices is numerically unstable, a bit like any computerized tomography. This is similar to constraining a noisy CAT scan, to avoid the "nonphysical property" that the air at some point in your lungs has density less than zero.

Engtangling a live animal is a hell of a party trick. No doubt about that. So how much does this matter scientifically? Here we're getting into subjective territory, and what follows is my opinion.

The surprising aspect is biological, not physical. I might have guessed that, if you cooled a tardigrade to the temperature that quantum electronics operate at, you could use it as a quantum electronic component. I wouldn't have guessed that the tardigrade would get up and walk away afterwards!

The philosophical significance? It depends, of course. For materialists like me, who make sense of quantum wierdness the Everettian way, it makes no difference. Of course electrons can get entangled, and the electrons in a tardigrade—or a physicist—are still electrons. (The price we pay is a very, very, odd sense of personal identity.)

For idealists, this is quite a big deal. If you insist that you are a definite state of consciousness, then you need to draw a line somewhere, between the part of the universe that is you, and the other parts that can be quantum superpositions. Twenty years ago, that was easy: you're an animal, not an atom, duh.

This makes it a bit harder: you're a ... big animal? How big, exactly? You could be some non-electronic degree of freedom, but surely that's a stretch neurologically.

It's a lot easier to draw a categorical distinction of animal vs mineral than of human-like observers vs other animals. If they can entangle a tardigrade, then in principle they could entangle your pet dog. Is it much comfort that they can't, yet, entangle you?

[dekhn]

Note that they describe using a tun, which is a form of tardigrade which has evacuated pretty much all water and is metabolically inert. These forms can survive thousands of years of harsh conditions and have effectively no chemical activity. None of this work would translate beyond organisms that enter such states.

I won't really comment on whether the authors did what they said, except to point out that academics are highly incentivized to make their work sound both more "significant" (that is, important beyond what they did in their lab) and "impressive" (that is, a greater technical achievement than what they did in their lab).

[thisrod]

The biology is even more interesting than I thought. These things have brains, which shut down, then reboot when they rehydrate. Wow!

[dang]

Thanks! I appreciate the detailed and super interesting explanation.

I may be wrong, but my sense is that the authors confused things a bit for the general internet reader by (let's say) not entirely resisting the troll potential here.

[thisrod]

> not entirely resisting the troll potential here

Entirely possible. The sad thing is, when I've seen physicists take the "no such thing as bad publicity" approach, it's worked. University presidents watch the news too.