A pendulum swings both left and right at the same time. In the atomic world, such a 'double' state is called a Schrödinger's cat: a particle exists in two states simultaneously, like the cat in the thought experiment — both alive and dead.
Scientists have found a way to assemble such states from many atoms using short light pulses. The pulses quickly 'rotate' and 'squeeze' the atomic cloud, much like a chef whips batter with quick whisk strokes. The more atoms in the cloud, the less squeezing is needed — the benefit grows as the square root of the number of atoms.
The practical payoff is ultra-sensitive sensors. They could be used for GPS-free navigation, dark matter searches, or gravitational wave detectors. And crucially, the method works even when atoms are lost due to light scattering — precision barely suffers.
A pendulum swinging both ways at once is no longer just a thought experiment. It's a tool that will soon leave the lab.
Schrödinger's cat is not a real cat but a thought experiment from 1935. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised it to illustrate the strangeness of the quantum world: a particle can be in two states at once until observed.
In the series 'Dark', quantum entanglement is used for communication across time — a distant echo of the superposition ideas underlying this work.