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A new image shows us what it is like when a cat both is and is not
Warning: Confusion.
QUANTUM MECHANICS IS not everybody’s cup of tea. However, most people are able to grasp the concept of Schrödinger’s cat.
Loosely speaking, the thought experiment states that, depending on earlier random events, a cat placed in a box can be both alive and dead.
The experiment asks: If you put a cat inside a box and make his life dependent on a random event, when does the cat die? When the event occurs or when you open the box?
Is the cat alive until it can be confirmed dead? If so, the cat is in both states until the box is opened.
Regardless of the answer, the cat has now been caught.
An image has been created using ‘quantum entanglement’ to illustrate the famous cat-in-a-box theory.
The experiment was carried out by Gabriela Barreto Lemos and her colleagues at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.
The image was created using photons and a stencil of a cat. The ‘quantum magic’ of it occurred as none of the yellow photons (which created the image) hit the stencil and none of the red photons (which also created the image) went near the camera.
Yes, the image was made without the lights touching the lens or the stencil because of a quantum link.
Confused? Science Daily explained that:
To do it, the researchers created yellow and red pairs of entangled photons. The yellow photons were fired at the cat stencil, while the red photons were sent to the camera. Thanks to their entanglement, the red photons formed the image of the cat because of the quantum link to their yellow twins.
“The silicon stencil was transparent to red light and the camera could only detect red light. This demonstrates that the technique can image objects that are invisible to the detected photons.”
Simple.
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