Is it (at least theoretically) possible for a macroscopic object to undergo ‘quantum’ tunneling?
As I understand it the phenomenon of quantum tunneling is a consequence of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, and so is not applicable to (collapsed) macroscopic objects.
Am I correct in this assumption? Or does the infinite improbability drive have some merit after all?
As far as we know, yes. Although it’s so absurdly improbable that it doesn’t really matter.
I have a Scientific American article written by one of my professors (The Challenge of Large Numbers Feb. '97), and he gives these examples: a beer can on a flat surface will fall over due to quantum tunneling after an average of 10[sup]10[sup]33[/sup][/sup] years. He estimates that the odds of a person being teleported to Mars “at least momentarily alive” (one shudders to think of the approximations involved) in their lifetime are 10[sup]10[sup]51[/sup][/sup] to 1.
I read an article on tunnelling a few years back… it was discussing how to make matter travel faster than light. The phenomena of tunnelling was an example that showed that it was possible, even if it wasn’t very useful.
One of the things they said was that the larger the object was, the less likely it’d “tunnel” (I don’t know if it’s appropriate to use it as a verb). Basically, a macro object would need to get all of it’s particles to tunnel at once - a near impossiblity, realistically speaking - or else it’d simply smash itself into pieces.
I’ve sometimes wondered if maybe superfluid liquid helium has no friction because it doesn’t actually flow in the classical sense; maybe it actually teleports in small jumps.