A group of physicists claim to have created a world of quantum that can be moved into the "hot and wet" systems of life.
Many quantum researchers are arguing that the poor tardigrade wasn't entangled in a meaningful way, despite the results described in this preprint paper.
"I don't know how serious the authors were about this, it could be a tongue-in-cheek piece," writes Rice University physics professor Douglas Natelson.
The authors did not entangle a tardigrade with a qubit in any meaningful sense. This isn't quantum biology.
When two or more particles are linked in a way that their fundamental quality is not independent of each other, it's called quantum entanglement.
If you found a right-handed glove in your drawer, you could be certain the missing glove would fit your left hand, because knowing something about one tells you something important about the other.
After a particle collision,anglement happens in quantum systems. Physicists have shown in the years since that it isn't hard to produce an entangled object.
Scientists have done a good job of unraveling larger and larger things. They've entangled a lot of things.
All of those systems are very small and well organized. A tardigrade is a large collection of frozen, messy biological molecules.
The researchers took a tardigrade species called Ramazzottius varieornatus and put it into a dehydrated state. They put it under extremely low pressure of just 0.000006 millibars, after cooling it down to just 10kelvin.
The team ran experiments where they tried to entangle the tardigrade with two transmon qubits and found that they were not compatible with the creature.
They heated up the tardigrade after about 400 hours of experimentation.
A number of physicists and science writers are pointing out that this isn't something that hasn't been done before.
Ben Brubaker, a physicist and science writer, says that the qubit is an electrical circuit and that putting the tardigrade next to it affects it through the laws of electromagnetism.
A small amount of dust next to the qubit would have the same effect.
This is not an entangled tardigrade in any sense of the word. It's either a classical interaction between a qubit and a tardigrade, or there was no evidence of interaction at all, according to which physicist.
This is a new record for the conditions that a complex form of life can survive, which is the most interesting part of the new study. We need to wait for peer review to verify these claims.
We don't have enough evidence for the first living organisms to have been quantum entangled, as exciting as the idea of a quantum tardigrade may sound.
We don't know if the researchers knew their work would get a lot of scrutiny, and we don't know how seriously we should be taking this research.
Tara Roberson is a researcher at the Australian Research Council Centre of excellence for engineered quantum systems who specializes in science communication and 'hype'.
If you want something complex and dense to be read, you don't put it up in December. If you're uploading something silly and easy for people, now is the time.
The idea of an entangled tardigrade made me laugh, but I don't know if that was part of the research team's thought process.
The paper can be found on the server arXiv.
