What kills Schrödinger’s cat? Gravity may not be the answer
Physicists have put a decades-old idea about why the strange rules of quantum mechanics disappear in our everyday world to one of its toughest experimental tests yet.
Physicists have put a decades-old idea about why the strange rules of quantum mechanics disappear in our everyday world to one of its toughest experimental tests yet.
The short version
- Deep beneath Italy’s Gran Sasso mountain, researchers searched for an extremely faint radiation signal predicted by a theory suggesting that tiny fluctuations in spacetime, caused by gravity, gradually destroy quantum superpositions.
- After 62 days of measurements with a highly shielded germanium detector, they found no such signal.
- At some point between the tiny world of particles and atoms and the much larger world we experience every day, quantum behavior appears to fade away.
What happened
Quantum mechanics allows particles to exist in combinations of possible states, a phenomenon known as superposition. That strange feature inspired Schrödinger's famous thought experiment involving a cat that is both alive and dead until it is observed.
Why it matters
Yet objects in the everyday world do not behave that way.
Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at ScienceDaily — Top Science via the links above and below.