Yes its the shift from the "wave" to the "particle".
Now let me throw on another level,
The wave is not a physical wave, its more of a concept.
The wave is the PROBABILITY distribution of where its at and what its doing.
So imagine you have a die in the Yatzee! cup. You roll the die in the cup but DONT look.
The die could read anything (1,2,3,4,5,6). The probability for any of those options is 1/6.
Once you look at the die, it magically becomes only one option, theres only one number that is face up.
When you looked and the die changed from being any number to some number, thats decoherence.
Now you can understand part of the wierdness, you might say, "Hey, whether I look in the cup or not, only one number on the die is facing up. It's not like in the REAL world all the numbers are partially facing up, thats just crazy."
But that is precisely the wierdness that Quantum Theory implies, while in wave form the particle is partially in all those places doing all those things. And hence, in that article all the confusion of what is happening in REALITY (whatever that means now) is a major portion of experiment and theory.
An example if you will permit:
There is an eletron in a completely sealed box. In the real world (lol) there is no way possible, no how, it could never in a million years, come close to even trying to get out of that box.
But in the quantum world, the wave for the particle exists outside the box (the wave is very small outside, but it is there). So it may be that if you had a million boxes, or a million electrons, or a million years, there is a chance that electron will actually magically appear outside the box!
Since it actually went through the wall (not through any leak or anything) but full Star Trek disappear and reappear somewhere else, this example is refered to as the tunneling electron.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_tunnelingExcept for some of the math behind this we are now reaching the end of my knowledge on the subject. I only took the one modern physics course. I can just inagine what the real physicists and especially quantum mech physicists take.
Drew
