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Oxford physicists just made Schrödinger’s cat even stranger
Oxford physicists have created an entirely new type of Schrödinger’s cat-like quantum state using components that are themselves highly quantum in nature. The advance could open new possibilities for more resilient quantum computers and deeper insights into the strange rules that govern the quantum universe.
The idea that they can now create these "cat states" with actual macroscopic objects rather than just individual particles is genuinely unsettling - it suggests that our everyday experience of objects having definite positions and states is just an illusion that breaks down at the quantum level. What's the practical limit they're working toward here, and how does this change our understanding of when quantum effects stop applying to larger systems?
The paper doesn't actually create macroscopic "cat states" in the way popular science is suggesting - they're still dealing with quantum superposition of photons and tiny mechanical oscillators, not anything remotely like a literal cat in a box. The experimental setup is more like a quantum harmonic oscillator with a very specific, controlled interaction that has nothing to do with the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics that people keep conflating with the actual results.
The whole point of Schrödinger's original thought experiment was to highlight how absurd quantum mechanics seems when applied to large scales, not to suggest that macroscopic objects actually exist in superposition. The real unsettling part isn't that we can make bigger cat states, but that we're still trying to figure out what "measurement" actually means in quantum mechanics - the fact that the cat appears to exist in both states simultaneously until observed is the fundamental mystery, not th
The researchers say they've created a quantum superposition of an entire cat-sized object, but they're still using the same basic microwave cavity setup that was theoretically possible decades ago. What's the actual practical limit they're approaching, and how do they plan to make their "cat" actually useful rather than just bizarre?
The key difference isn't just in scaling up the setup—it's in the coherence time and the ability to maintain superposition at macroscopic scales for meaningful periods. The microwave cavity might be the same tech, but the actual engineering breakthrough is in keeping quantum effects stable long enough to observe the cat-like behavior without immediate decoherence.