Re: In today's news...
Oh my, I seem to have grossly misinterpreted the term "quantum tunneling", which I just attempted to rectify. Unfortunately the wiki article suggests that the material is being traveled through. Which contradicts what you've said, I think, so I'm going to assume that they're wrong or just phrasing it improperly (because fuck you, we're going to use words as descriptors and then italics them as if that's a universal sign that the word means : ?).
The uniformity of a circular pattern seems to suggest that the distance traveled is a result of a factor that was applied equally to all the water. Could it be that electrons have access to some extra-dimensional space which they travel through when magically teleporting (I just can't imagine the shortest distance between two points being a *poof*, instead of a straight line)? And if so, is it then possible that the energy from the pressure being applied to the water molecules allowed the electrons to drag the rest of the molecule through aforementioned extra-dimensional space?
The problem is at this level we actually do sometimes need to argue about what words mean. Words are just constructs for our ideas, after all, and as such it really doesn't matter what combinations of sounds we use for something, but when it comes to advanced science it also means sometimes we're a serious loss just because more accurate words haven't been "invented" yet.
To address the question at hand, though, there are likely two things going on. When addressing quantum things, as crazy crazy crazy as it sounds, sometimes distance actually doesn't matter. Sometimes the shortest path really is a poof, but that also fails to catch the fact that there really isn't a "path" involved. It just exists one way one moment and another way the next moment. Location is simply a property of existence. There really isn't any "travel" involved.
That said, exerting physical pressure on something could theoretically cause additional quantum tunneling. At the quantum level things don't sit still, they vibrate, for lack of a better word. Things are teleporting all the time, it's just that it's not worth mentioning because the change in location is too small to affect literally anything we know, except these few very very specific cases. Granted, this is again me talking without a source, but I imagine what's happening is the pressure moves the lead water molecules very slightly closer to the material, so very slightly that we probably can't even appreciably measure it. However, the difference is small enough that while the water wouldn't normally teleport to the other side because it's out of range, it's moved just enough that a very tiny bit of it's range is on the other side of the material. Therefore, statistically speaking, eventually the molecule will decide it's on the other side.
It's easier to grasp if you don't think of matter as an object, but as a field of probabilities.
