Quantum Geek Talk

"it's very difficult to get photons to stay where they're put"

This is deliberate understatement, no doubt, but one should replace the word "difficult" with "impossible". Photons are always observed to move at, and only at, the speed of light (C). You can use tricks to "slow" light but what happens there is that it's not the same photon from one moment to the next, in such systems the photons are continually absorbed and re-emitted by electrons in some material.

"The researchers note that the drum is actually a quasi-quantum memory: its beat is a classical system, but in a quantum-noisy environment. This author isn't physicist enough to completely understand the distinction"

Real quantum memory is extremely delicate, it depends on isolation from its environment. What we seem to have here is a classical mechanics system that "remembers" quantum mechanical events, very loosely speaking.

It is not only the author who isn't "physicist enough" to understand the distinction between quantum and classical mechanical systems. Real physicists do not understand the distinction either(!) There are conjectures but these are based on "interpretations" of what QM really is - and none of those is agreed upon, to put it mildly. Most physics shrug and go along with the "shut up and calculate" interpretation, which says, it's too weird to make any sense, but the mathematics gives us accurate physical predictions.

Oh it's pretty easy to explain...

Either it works, gets more work on it, or we buy some thing else and either come back to it when it does work or we ignore it completely forever.

This is Fizzicks for you.

Elemental my dear Plank.

Spinning platters

There is just no way of escaping them