Nice work if you can get it! Here we read:
A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.
Andrew Cleland at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his team cooled a tiny metal paddle until it reached its quantum mechanical "ground state"– the lowest-energy state permitted by quantum mechanics. They then used the weird rules of quantum mechanics to simultaneously set the paddle moving while leaving it standing still. The experiment shows that the principles of quantum mechanics can apply to everyday objects as well as as atomic-scale particles.
So we have a little object, visible to the naked eye, that is simultaneously moving and not moving. Is that possible? Yes, if one part is moving and a distinct part is not moving. Presumably that is not what is meant above. What is meant is that the whole object is simultaneously both moving and not moving. That too is possible if 'simultaneously' or 'at the same time' is being applied to an interval of time. Consider a temporal interval five seconds in duration. Let 't' refer to that interval. It is surely possible that object O, the whole of it, be at rest at t and in motion at t. But this triviality is also not what is meant above.
When a science journalist reports about a scientific experiment and its supposed results you ought to be very skeptical. (You should also take with several grains of salt anything that bona fide scientists write in books for popular consumption, books they typically write to get the money and attention that they cannot get from their scientific work.) The above linked article gives me no clear idea as to what Cleland and his team are up to.
But of one thing I am certain. There will never be an empirical refutation by direct sense perception of the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC):
LNC. (F)(x)~(Fx & ~Fx)
which is to say: for any property F-ness, and any object x, it is not the case that x is F and x is not F. For example, nothing is both red and non-red.
This is subject to the usual tripartite qualification: an object cannot be F and not F (i) at the same instant of time, (ii) in the same respect, and (iii) in the same sense. Thus a ball could be both red and non-red at different times, or red and non-red in respect of different hemispheres, or in different senses: Jack can be both red and non-red at the same time if 'red' in its first occurrence refers to a color, and in its second occurrence to a political affiliation.
Could there be something, visible to the naked eye like the little paddle described above, that serves as a counterexample to LNC? Of course not. If someone were to point to some such phenomenon I would reply that he was misdescribing the situation. I would look for an equivocation on a key term, or a difference in respect, or a difference in time. And I would find one.
Consider the phenomenon of iridescence. It is possible that an object appear green all over and blue all over at the same time. But it would be a mistake to conclude that this an empirical counterexample to LNC. For there is a difference in respect: to one person it appears blue at t, to another green at t.
I am open to the possiblity that LNC does not apply to ultimate reality. Perhaps ultimate reality, reality an sich, beyond the senses and beyond the discursive intellect, is translogical or suprarational. But that is not the issue at the moment. The issue is whether anything that appears to the naked senses (to the naked eye, for example) could serve as a counterexample to LNC. That is impossible, because satisfaction of LNC is an a priori condition of anything's appearing to our senses in the first place.
A second consideration is that LNC, whatever else it does, lays down a semantic constraint, a constraint on meaningfulness as I patiently explain in a separate post. Someone who asserts a contradictory sentence will not be taken to have expressed a definite thought. If you utter a contradictory sentence, I will charitably reinterpret your sentence in a manner that removes the contradiction. If I cannot remove the contradiction by making a distinction in time, respect, or sense, then I will exclaim: "What are the hell are you saying? Which proposition are you trying to convey to me?" If you cannot answer these questions, then you are not satisfying an elementary a priori constraint on meaningful discourse.