Ask a biologist if a virus is a living thing, and you'll find that it's not exactly an easy question to answer - viruses, like the much-ballyhooed H1N1, do show some properties of living things...but not all of them. The debate rages on.
But now...the question is about to get murkier, thanks to an awesome experiment being proposed by researchers at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Quantenoptik (what a mouthful) in Germany. They plan to take a virus, put it in a vacuum, shoot it with a laser (lasers!), and thereby put it into a state of superposition - a fancy term from quantum physics that means, in very simple terms, that it will be in two places at once.
Seriously.
If you're curious about how anything can be in two places at once, search for "Schrodinger's Cat" - a classic thought experiment in quantum physics.
If you're curious about how anything can be in two places at once, search for "Schrodinger's Cat" - a classic thought experiment in quantum physics.
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