Cold enough for you ?

It’s the Netherlands, I have to have a picture of windmills…

Left Amsterdam two days ago. A very pleasant stay it was, although the weather has not been cooperating much (rained almost non stop over the past five days). Things are no better in Egham (UK), where I am staying until next week. Not only is it raining here too (not surprising an occurrence in England, I suppose), it is actually quite chilly…
Altogether, I am attending four different conferences during this European trip (the other three in Wroclaw, Egham and Trieste). The meeting that I attended in Amsterdam is a decent size one by physics standards (approximately 1300 delegates), with presentations and posters spanning different areas of experimental and theoretical research, mostly in condensed matter and atomic physics. Actually, though, all four are centered around the same general broad theme, namely low temperature physics.

The invisible (?) quantum world

The word quantum, and the weirdness of phenomena that Quantum Mechanics (QM) successfully describes, fascinate many a writer and thinker outside the physics community; every now and then, some of them attempt to establish improbable parallels between experimentally observable effects that occur at the atomic and subatomic level (such as entanglement) and their quantum-mechanical theoretical interpretation, and aspects of our daily experience in which QM most likely does not belong, such as the workings of the human mind, the existence of parallel universes, body healing… you name it.