Quantum leap: not as far as you think

About a year ago I was going nuts over the announcement of Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, for all the wrong reasons: the advertising.

Only Apple Inc. could hang a huge promotional banner declaring 0 New Features to thunderous, and legitimate, applause. Snow Leopard was about tightening all the bolts, spending a year's engineering resources on tuning and improving the invisible core of the operating system. Normally, this kind of effort is secondary to creating new user-focused features one can advertise.

Bold, Steve.

But there was one piece ofp romo work that threw me into paroxysms of ecstasy, featured here:

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The term quantum leap has been used plenty often in ad copy throughout the decades, always evoking a sense of advancement, of scientific innovation with lasers and clean rooms and, oh yes, crystals.

http://www.youtube.com/v/cf3bRXGmkJE&hl=en&fs=1

Also a pretty cool TV show starring Count Bakula of Star Trek Enterprise fame. But they were all terribly, terribly wrong.

Erwin Schrödinger teaches us (well, not him per se, but considering I just pimped his work in the Schrödinger's Litterbox piece I thought I'd call him back) that quantum jumps are electrons transitioning from one quantum state to another within an atom thruogh a brief period of superposition.

In other words, it's an infinitessimally small change, one that can't be directly observed by mere mortals.

Like a desktop operating system which offers almost no new user-facing features.

Bingo.