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A cat sitting in a regular square (l) and the Kanizsa square illusion (r). (Smith et al., Applied Animal Behaviour Science 2021) Our feline friends certainly wow us with their cleverness - they can fetch things, open doors, navigate seemingly impossible obstacles, and even understand basic instructions (when they feel like it, anyway). At other times, they can be hilariously silly. Any cat lover is familiar with their quirks, such as seemingly endless joy at knocking things off tables, and an innate fondness for sitting in enclosed spaces. The latter can apply even if that space is just a two-dimensional...

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has committed millions of dollars to research treatments and vaccines for COVID-19 as the pandemic continues to spread across the globe. Those endeavors are now fueling a lot of conspiracy theories. Of course even Bill Gates made some strange comments that fueled those conspiracy theories. Back in March he said, the country needs to go much further with a longer, coordinate shutdown to effectively turn back the spread of the disease. “We’re entering to a tough period that if we do it right we’ll only have to do it once, for six to 10...

Quantum mechanics’ core assumption is that on the smallest scales, atomic properties are quantized...For example, an electron can be in a lowest-energy state, but if you add a little more energy, it doesn’t slowly transition into the new higher-energy state. Rather, it unpredictably snaps into the new state. If you’re not looking at it, the atom can take on intermediate states—but these aren’t midway points. The atom would be in both states at the same time, and then once you observed it, it would immediately snap into one state or the other. The team’s artificial atom is an experimental apparatus...

Physicists have learned how they could breed Schrödinger cats in optics. Scientists tested a method that could potentially amplify superpositions of classical states of light beyond microscopic limits and help determine the boundaries between the quantum and classical worlds. ... Co-author and University of Calgary graduate student Anastasia Pushkina explains: "The idea of the experiment was proposed in 2003 by the group of Professor Timothy Ralph of the University of Queensland, Australia. In essence, we cause interference of two "cats" on a beam splitter. This leads to an entangled state in the two output channels of that beam splitter. In...

In a paper published in the current issue of the scientific journal Nature Communications and titled "Direct measurement of a 27-dimensional orbital-angular-momentum state vector," a team of physicists led by the University of Rochester's Mehul Malik describe how they circumvented a basic principle of uncertainty that requires that some states of a quantum system must be understood poorly if other states are to be understood well. Determining a quantum state, such as the position of an electron or the momentum of a photon, is tricky, to say the least. That's because subatomic particles behave nothing at all like billiard balls,...

Schrödinger's cat now has a second box to play in, thanks to an international team of physicists that has created a two-mode "Schrödinger's cat state" for the first time. The experiment brings together two purely quantum properties, in that the "cat" (i.e. the photons) is simultaneously "alive and dead" (in a superposition of states) while also in two locations at once (the two boxes are entangled with one another).

Yale physicists have given Schrödinger's cat a second box to play in. Credit: Michael S. Helfenbein/Yale University ====================================================================================================================== Yale physicists have given Schrödinger's famous cat a second box to play in, and the result may help further the quest for reliable quantum computing. Schrödinger's cat is a well-known paradox that applies the concept of superposition in quantum physics to objects encountered in everyday life. The idea is that a cat is placed in a sealed box with a radioactive source and a poison that will be triggered if an atom of the radioactive substance decays. Quantum physics suggests that the...

In 1909, Ernest Rutherford, Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden took a piece of radium and used it to fire charged particles at a sheet of gold foil. They wanted to test the then-dominant theory that atoms were simply clusters of electrons floating in little seas of positive electrical charge (the so-called ‘plum pudding’ model). What came next, said Rutherford, was ‘the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life’. Despite the airy thinness of the foil, a small fraction of the particles bounced straight back at the source – a result, Rutherford noted, ‘as incredible as...