Scientific American Two teams have demonstrated new degrees of quantum measurements in micron-sized metal drums Print Researchers entangled the beats of these minuscule, drumlike aluminum membranes and precisely measured their interlinked quantum properties. Systems such as these could someday help perform computations and transmit data in quantum networks. Credit: Teufel and NIST Advertisement One of the more irksome results of quantum mechanics is the revelation that reality is largely a persistent illusion. Quantum mechanics is not merely a theory of the microscopic: all matter is fundamentally quantum—it just so happens that weird quantum effects are hard to observe in anything bigger than a few atoms. Like the flickering silhouettes on the wall in Plato’s allegory of the cave, the existence of macroscopic, so-called “classical” objects is merely a shadow cast by their true quantum forms. This much is not news to physicists, who have been mucking around in the quantum world for more than a century and are mostly unbothered by the crumbling edifice of reality.