Thiago Guerreiro

A translator gets distracted by every rustle in the room, and an hour-long meeting stretches into two. Quantum mechanics works the same way: any measurement disturbs the system, wiping out part of the information. Physicists have long suspected that the gravitational radiation from black holes should obey the same rules, but proving it for strong fields kept failing.

A flashlight beam in a dark room can hold a dust mote almost still: that's how optical tweezers work. But light doesn't just push the particle; it also jostles it with random kicks. Each absorbed photon strikes it like an invisible hammer. The authors of the new study have devised a light trap of a special shape.

A runner on the anchor leg of a relay race takes the baton and runs on. If the baton could carry two different starting points inside it, the runner would set off in two directions at once.

In a dark room, you can hold a glowing sphere without touching it: walls of light push it away but do not burn it. That is roughly how the trap built in Rio de Janeiro for yeast cells works. A conventional optical tweezer, that is, a focused laser beam, acts like tweezers made of light, but the light itself pierces the cell from side to side.