![]() One could force the cards to appear in a different set of colours, akin to doing another type of measurement. But opening the second still always reveals the opposite colour because it is “spookily” linked to the first card. Opening one envelope reveals one colour determined at random. If your friend takes away and opens one of the envelopes and finds the blue card, they will know you have the orange card.īut to understand quantum mechanics, you have to imagine the two cards inside the envelopes are in a joint superposition, meaning they are both orange and blue at the same time (specifically orange/blue and blue/orange). For example, imagine you tell your friend you have placed a blue card in one envelope and an orange card in another. Simple analogies can explain entanglementĮntanglement is a quantum property which links two different particles so that if you measure one, you automatically and instantly know the state of the other – no matter how far apart they are.Ĭommon explanations for it typically involve everyday objects from our classical macroscopic world, such as dice, cards or even pairs of odd-coloured socks. This does not mean that quantum coherence is impossible in biological systems, just that it generally won’t apply to big creatures such as cats or a human. Any coherence that the trillions upon trillions of atoms that make up the cat might have with each other is extremely shortlived. So what does this mean for our poor cat? Is it really both alive and dead as long as we don’t open the box? Obviously, a cat is nothing like an individual photon in a controlled lab environment, it is much bigger and more complex. One famous experiment by Anton Zeilinger in 1999 demonstrated quantum superposition with large molecules of Carbon-60 known as “buckyballs”. These superposition experiments can be done with objects of ever increasing size and complexity. It suggests that an unlucky feline stuck in a box with a kill switch triggered by a random quantum event – radioactive decay, for example – could be alive and dead at the same time, as long as we don’t open the box to check.įor this to work, however, the states (waves) in the superposition of the particle going through both slits need to be “ coherent” – having a well defined relationship with each other. A cat can be dead and aliveĮrwin Schrödinger could probably never have predicted that his thought experiment, Schrödinger’s cat, would attain internet meme status in the 21st century. ![]() When the 2022 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for research shedding light on quantum mechanics, it sparked excitement and discussion.īut debates about quantum mechanics – be they on chat forums, in the media or in science fiction – can often get muddled thanks to a number of persistent myths and misconceptions. Unlike many other areas of physics, it is bizarre and counter-intuitive, which makes it dazzling and intriguing. Quantum mechanics, the theory which rules the microworld of atoms and particles, certainly has the X factor. ![]()
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