Καινοτομία

A real cat can’t be both alive and dead at the same time, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger said. But quantum physics rewrites the rules, a fact now demonstrated by a team of researchers funded by the EU.

Schrödinger’s famous feline thought experiment showed how tricky it is to apply quantum theory to real life. But photons behave differently to cats. Superposition means photons can be all things - in all states and places - at once. They don’t even obey the rules of cause and effect, where events follow each other in a certain causal order.