A sealed box, a cat, a vial of poison, and a quantum trigger that may or may not fire. As long as Schrödinger’s thought experiment has circulated, it has pointed to a gap in our picture of nature. Atoms and subatomic particles can occupy two states at once. Tables, people, and cats cannot. Somewhere between a single particle and a living animal, the both-at-once description gives way to ordinary, one-thing-at-a-time reality. Physicists call that fading of quantum overlap decoherence. In their
schrodingerscat (2)
A sealed box, a cat, a vial of poison, and a quantum trigger that may or may not fire. As long as Schrödinger’s thought experiment has circulated, it has pointed to a gap in our picture of nature. Atoms and subatomic particles can occupy two states at once. Tables, people, and cats cannot. Somewhere between a single particle and a living animal, the both-at-once description gives way to ordinary, one-thing-at-a-time reality. Physicists call that fading of quantum overlap decoherence. In their
