Sebastian Seung: I am my connectome Does Schrödinger's cat really exist? You bet. The first ever quantum superposition in an object visible to the naked eye has been observed.
Aaron O'Connell and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, did not actually produce a cat that was dead and alive at the same time, as Erwin Schrödinger proposed in a notorious thought experiment 75 years ago. But they did show that a tiny resonating strip of metal – only 60 micrometres long, but big enough to be seen without a microscope – can both oscillate and not oscillate at the same time. Alas, you couldn't actually see the effect happening, because that very act of observation would take it out of superposition. "We talk about quantum weirdness and things being in two places at once, but it all involves atoms and molecules, stuff we don't normally interact with," says O'Connell, who presented the results at the March meeting of the American Physical Society in Portland, Oregon, today. Next, the cat?
"It's like you have a child's swing that goes back and forth," says O'Connell. "We pushed the swing and didn't push the swing at the same time.""This is challenging and creative work," says Khaled Karrai of Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich, Germany. "If correct, it is a breakthrough." Schrödinger's cat would be unlikely to survive the frigid temperatures of such experiments, so it is perhaps not the next milestone to look out for. But now the spooky influence of quantum physics on visible objects Has Been Proved, can we expect to Be putting an object as large as a real child's swing an indeterminate quantum state Into Any time soon? O'Connell Thinks so. "I'd say in the near future - in the next 20 years." Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08967
