Lets not forget that they are speaking about neutrinos - particles that are notoriously hard to detect precisely because they hardly interact with "regular" matter.

So the fact that they traveled hundreds? of miles still in superposition states just means that they did not interact with anything over those distances.

I am failing to understand how this is weird, in-fact this is exactly what the theory calls for.

Yes, that's the point. The press office just got clickbaity with the word "weird," as it always does for any QM paper.

Now the high-frequency trading people will have to build accelerators and detectors so they can transmit in a straight line through the earth. They could knock off an entire millisecond or two between London and New York and beat everybody else.

It gets proposed fairly often. The tricky part is detecting enough neutrinos in a coincidence window to make a meaningful trading signal.

Such an experiment is also very expensive.

A $300 million cable is being laid across the Atlantic just to cut off 5ms for high-frequency trading.[1] Bandwidth will cost 50x normal on that cable.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8753784/The-300m-...

Neutrino experiments cost of order a billion dollars. The event rate for anthropogenic neutrinos sources at the MINOS detector (from the article) is a few hundred events over 1 year.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ex/0607088v2.pdf

So the bandwidth for this state-of-the-art billionish-dollar detector is measured in μbps :)

Flipped over, if you can invent a reliable neutrino detector and influencer that costs say $150M you have a very risk tolerant market to sell into.

So you're saying there's a chance? /s

Spread Networks built a $300m line between Chicago and NJ just to save 3 milliseconds. That project involved building a tunnel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_Networks

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/14/opinion/krugman-three-expe...

Expensive for HFTs?

Expensive enough to not be profitable

Thankfully!

Uninformed question: isn't this somewhat what we'd expect? Neutrinos interact very weakly with matter so they're much more likely to stay in superposition? Or is this happening at a much greater scale than expected?

That's my impression also: distance travelled as an inherent property shouldn't 'break' quantum effects. It matters only because larger scale implies a larger chance of interaction, and because it relates to no-go theorems. Still, I don't think these effects have been seen over such distances, even if they were expected.

Despite the title, the scientists quoted don't sound baffled as much as excited. I think this is a case of "we found it after all!"

Spooky

Spooky because of the metaphors used to describe quantum mechanical phenomena, or because it has implications or applications that you're wary of?

I think that's a reference to Einstein's famous ridicule of quantum mechanics, "spooky action at a distance".

What a clickbaity title.

I've never understood this complaint.

Why would a writer NOT create a clickbaity title?

Every writer wants his work to be read. Would you rather have the writer create a dull title that you don't click on at all?

That robs the writer off pageviews, you of valuable information, and the site of revenue. No one benefits.

I think the complaint is for cases when there is no valuable information behind clickbaity title - then writer gets pageviews, site gets revenue, but the user only wastes his time, getting no valuable information.

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MIT's press office is master of the clickbait-overhype one-two punch, but in this case "MIT Scientists" is a justified because this is a release from the MIT press office. It's standard form for institutions, local news, etc.

... it's MIT's news department.