Which brings me to the most useful note on listening to public speakers: if the word "quantum" is used, get up and leave, turning over tables if necessary. Some kinds of madness are contagious. What they are doing is creating an analogy to something that neither they nor you have spent long enough with to be comfortable, and attempting by that analogy to describe aspects of something that you can personally experience. A good friend of mine from Ohio called it "the fallacy of ignotum per ignotius -- explaining the unknown by means of the still more unknown".
The fallacy of ignotum per ignoscibilis (the unknown through the unknowable) is also popular. Like the people who assume that they can know what prehistoric man was like and base their arguments about modern society on that. That is rather old-fashioned (my father clings to it), but the ones who act as though the existence of intelligent life outside earth were proven, and base their arguments on that, is widely popular.
Apparently the physicists are having fun comparing the bond-lengths between hydrogen and oxygen atom of water and deuterium: it seems that the wierd way water behaves (as opposed to normal liquids and solids, things like surface tension, ice density, etc.) are due to quantum mechanical effects.
Neat, eh?