quantum mechanics: superposition (Introduction)

by rekastner , Sunday, July 28, 2013, 00:26 (3927 days ago) @ David Turell

The motivation for the experiment comes from the 'Schrodinger's Cat' paradox. This is the paradox in which people couldn't seem to get the theory to give us predictions that macroscopic events (like cats) are determinate. Instead the theory seemed to give a persistent superposition even at the macroscopic level, which we never see (we always see only one thing or the other, not a quantum superposition). This is because they fail to take absorption and confirmations into account -- it is those which 'collapse' the cat to either 'alive' or 'dead'.- Since most people haven't figured this out yet, they continue to explore the 'mesoscopic' realm to see how far these superpositions really can persist even though they know that ordinary objects are never really in superpositions.- PTI can explain all this. I'm working on a paper now that will predict how hard it is to maintain a 'quantum superposition' of a system depending on its size (i.e. its number of component quanta).