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How can a corporation be legally considered a person?

We’ve dealt with some weird topics in this column–quantum mechanics, penile lengthening, Circus Peanuts. But for my money the personhood of corporations proves there’s nothing so strange as the law.

…bex, via the Straight Dope Message Board

We’ve dealt with some weird topics in this column–quantum mechanics, penile lengthening, Circus Peanuts. But for my money the personhood of corporations proves there’s nothing so strange as the law.

Most people have a general idea what corporations are. Some may even know that, for most of U.S. history, corporations have been considered “artificial persons.” The concept isn’t as nutty as it sounds. From a legal standpoint, corporations can do many of the same things that natural persons do–buy and sell property, hire and fire, sue and be sued, and so on.

What most people don’t know is that after the above-mentioned 1886 decision, artificial persons were held to have exactly the same legal rights as we natural folk. (Not to mention the clear advantages corporations enjoy: they can be in several places at once, for instance, and at least in theory they’re immortal.) Up until the New Deal, many laws regulating corporations were struck down under the “equal…

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How can a corporation be legally considered a person?

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Quantum Gas Microscope Offers Glimpse Of Quirky Ultracold

Physicists at Harvard University have created a quantum gas microscope that can be used to observe single atoms at temperatures so low the particles follow the rules of quantum mechanics, behaving in bizarre ways.

…The work, published November 5 in the journal Nature, represents the first time scientists have detected single atoms in a crystalline structure made solely of light, called a Bose Hubbard optical lattice. It’s part of scientists’ efforts to use ultracold quantum gases to understand and develop novel quantum materials.
“Ultracold atoms in optical lattices can be used as a model to help understand the physics behind superconductivity or quantum magnetism, for example,” says senior author Markus Greiner, an assistant professor of physics at Harvard and an affiliate of the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms. “We expect that our technique, which bridges the gap between earlier microscopic and macroscopic approaches to the study of quantum systems, will help in quantum simulations of condensed matter systems, and also find applications in quantum information processing.”
The quantum gas microscope developed by Greiner and his colleagues is a high-resolution device capable of viewing single atoms — in this…

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Quantum Gas Microscope Offers Glimpse Of Quirky Ultracold

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