"'If you talk to the community, maybe 50 percent would say this is normal because it's quantum physics, and the other 50 percent would really scratch their heads because it's quantum physics,' adds the scientist, who was one of the leaders on the new project."

Quote of the year.

Here is the original paper: http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano...

They used "derivatives of phthalocyanine molecules" with 1298 AMU.

The methods how they got the results (for example making a slit 10 nm wide) seem to be even more interesting than the result

Can someone please explain why this happens? I understand that for electrons, photons (or any fundamental particle?) there is a duality, but when you get a molecule, in my mind, it's now a thing, like a cat or a person. I know that if I did the double slit experiment with a people or cats I'd get a different result. Why do these molecules not behave like cats being thrown at a slit.

Slightly more info (and fewer distasteful ads) here: http://www.livescience.com/19268-quantum-double-slit-experim...

"Researchers were puzzled"... - I doubt they were, "Softpedia". This is entirely expected and in line with all previous results. For example http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2952

That's not to say it was a waste by any means - the techniques used will hopefully be useful to other scientists, and confirmation is always good :)

If they tried with a large enough object I wonder if they could film it going through the slits, like with a high-speed camera. I guess individual molecules can't be photographed without an electron microscope though.

The same group has proposed an improved version of the experiment with 1,000,000 amu gold clusters or larger.

http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/13/7/075002

Primary source:

http://www.quantumnano.at/

For those who find quantum physics weird, I've been reading through Eliezer Yudkowski's "quantum physics sequence". I'm only part-way through, but it has somewhat demystified things for me. It takes the approach of not trying to explain things in terms of bizzare classical physics approximations.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/

I'd say you can probably skip most of the preliminaries. But I didn't, so I'm not sure.

Call me when they repeat the experiment with cats.