Entanglement and decoherence: middle-brow treatment?

[bcrowell]

I'm a physicist, but I'm not a specialist in the foundations of quantum mechanics. This month's Scientific American has an article by Vlatko Vedral about entanglement and decoherence.

Paywalled article, with a brief summary: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=living-in-a-quantum-world

The article is so easy that I can't understand it. In other words, it's watered down so much for a general audience that I can't even extract any meaning from it. On the other hand, I suspect that I wouldn't be able to follow a "real" paper on this topic. Does anyone know of a good discussion of this kind of thing that's at a middle-brow level?

Some things from the paper that seemed interesting but that were described too vaguely for me to make anything of them:

-work by Aeppli, 2003, measuring the magnetic properties of a macroscopic salt crystal as a function of temperature

-work by Ritz, 2000, and by Vedral claiming that European robins sense magnetic fields using a system in which entanglement persists for 10^-4 s, which he apparently interprets to mean that a macroscopic biological system can really be in a superposition of states, like Schrodinger's cat

 

[DrChinese]

Have you tried anything like this:

http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/abs:+AND+superposition+AND+macroscopic+entanglement/0/1/0/all/0/1

I honestly haven't seen much come through that would really support the basic idea of the SA article. Not saying that it is technically incorrect, just that this is a very weak area to write a general article about. Let's call it for what it is: a bit of sensationalism.

 

[Bill_K]

Scientific American is not what it used to be.