Watch out for the Quantum Flu!

I recently came across this delicious article on the Arxiv: Towards Quantum Superposition of Living Organisms. The authors describe an experimental proposal involving the placement of a macroscopic object such as a virus in a quantum superposition of states. The object would be held in isolation from the environment using an optical tweezer setup by taking advantage of the dielectric properties of the objects to levitate and confine it in the optical cavity.Because they are not in contact with a substrate, the objects are able to be laser cooled to the (quantum) ground state of their mechanical motion. The objects can then be excited into a resonant quantum state of mechanical motion, and therefore also potentially into a superposition of ground and excited states.If you are obsessed with the idea of putting macroscopic objects into a superposition of states (as I am), this article is worth a read :)And of course it digs up all those lovely arguments about how macroscopic an organism has to be before it can be considered 'living' or 'self-aware' etc etc, and once again stomps all over that delightfully metaphysical hallowed ground, whilst physicists run towards their decoherence bunkers in fear.