QUOTE
Can reincarnation save Schrodinger's cat?
Reincarnation can indeed save Schrödinger's cat, reports Zeeya Merali in Nature News (July 2, 2008).
The "cat" is a 1935 thought experiment intended to illustrate the superposition of two states in quantum theory - that is, both states exist until a measurement is attempted, which forces one or other to prevail (live cat or dead cat).
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Now, Nadav Katz at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his colleagues have performed an experiment in which they pull a quantum state back from the brink of collapse, 'uncollapsing' it and returning it to its unobserved state. Effectively, they have peeked at Schrodinger's cat in its box, but saved it from near-certain death (N. Katz et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3547).
To physicists raised on the textbook Copenhagen interpretation, any notion of uncollapsing a quantum state seems “astonishing”, says Markus Büttiker, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. “On opening the box, Schrödinger's cat is either dead or alive — there is no in between.”
However, a more recent interpretation of quantum mechanics, 'decoherence theory', suggests that collapse does not occur instantaneously. Instead it plays out gradually as the quantum system slowly interacts with its environment (see Nature 453, 22–25; 2008). In 2006, Alexander Korotkov of the University of California, Riverside, and Andrew Jordan, of the University of Rochester in New York, proposed that this may leave open a time period in which experimenters could intervene to halt the collapse (A. N. Korotkov & A. N. Jordan Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 166805; 2006). They provided blueprints for an experiment to test the idea, which Katz, Korotkov and their colleagues have now done.
***
Well, if quantum collapse does not occur instantaneously, maybe events are not as certain as many have thought.
Reincarnation can indeed save Schrödinger's cat, reports Zeeya Merali in Nature News (July 2, 2008).
The "cat" is a 1935 thought experiment intended to illustrate the superposition of two states in quantum theory - that is, both states exist until a measurement is attempted, which forces one or other to prevail (live cat or dead cat).
***
Now, Nadav Katz at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his colleagues have performed an experiment in which they pull a quantum state back from the brink of collapse, 'uncollapsing' it and returning it to its unobserved state. Effectively, they have peeked at Schrodinger's cat in its box, but saved it from near-certain death (N. Katz et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3547).
To physicists raised on the textbook Copenhagen interpretation, any notion of uncollapsing a quantum state seems “astonishing”, says Markus Büttiker, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. “On opening the box, Schrödinger's cat is either dead or alive — there is no in between.”
However, a more recent interpretation of quantum mechanics, 'decoherence theory', suggests that collapse does not occur instantaneously. Instead it plays out gradually as the quantum system slowly interacts with its environment (see Nature 453, 22–25; 2008). In 2006, Alexander Korotkov of the University of California, Riverside, and Andrew Jordan, of the University of Rochester in New York, proposed that this may leave open a time period in which experimenters could intervene to halt the collapse (A. N. Korotkov & A. N. Jordan Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 166805; 2006). They provided blueprints for an experiment to test the idea, which Katz, Korotkov and their colleagues have now done.
***
Well, if quantum collapse does not occur instantaneously, maybe events are not as certain as many have thought.