Talk:Schrödinger's cat

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Typo

but the cat and box form a inseparable combination –> but the cat and box form an inseparable combination Azuregremlin (talk) 11:46, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

Done. Tercer (talk) 12:06, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

I checked the other source and MyBib(free citation generator) said it wasn't super credible, so I tried to find one that was more credible. These are the actual people who did the experiment. That one might explain it better, but it isn't very credible. So maybe put both (The original and one of these) to help people out there? Shadowsand47 (talk) 23:53, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

I believe 34 is
I deleted the source, it was a blog post.
The issue with the NIST link in 2010 is I suspect there are many similar works. See the refs in
  • Sychev, D. V., Ulanov, A. E., Pushkina, A. A., Richards, M. W., Fedorov, I. A., & Lvovsky, A. I. (2017). Enlargement of optical Schrödinger's cat states. Nature Photonics, 11(6), 379-382.
so why should we pick out the NIST work? I put it in the article for now. Johnjbarton (talk) 01:09, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

Is there a possibility to add "Schrödinger's Strait" as a metaphorical phase related to Strait of Hormuz under this article Schrödinger's cat?

I know it may not be ideal in serious circumstances, but maybe as a heading called "Legacy" or "Popular culture" in this article under Schrödinger's cat to describe how Strait of Hormuz shipping strait is both open and closed at the same time. This is based on the popular scientific experiment Schrödinger's cat by scientist Erwin Schrödinger and how certain media outlets are depicting the current trajectory about the Strait of Hormuz in a satirical metaphorical phrase as "Schrödinger's Strait" with regards to how the movements of vessels, cargo is being determined and monitored in the Strait of Hormuz. I know this may sound like a typical pseudo intellectual science nerd stuff but from the point of view of commercial shipping, the phrase "Schrödinger's Strait" would probably suit the way how only selected vessels of Iranian allies would be permitted to transit the Strait of Hormuz basically meaning that the strait is open with conditions to be fulfilled, whereas the Strait of Hormuz would be closed for rest of the countries' vessels if they do not comply with Iranian law and order. Abishe (talk) 07:40, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

That's not how Wikipedia works. Please see original research. Johnjbarton (talk) 16:07, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

Edit request: Add 'Decoherence and macroscopic superpositions' subsection to Applications and tests

Please add the following new subsection at the end of the Applications and tests section (section 13), immediately after the existing paragraph about determining cat state "before" observing it.

The proposed wikitext to insert is:

=== Decoherence and macroscopic superpositions ===
{{Main|Quantum decoherence}}
In modern treatments, Schrödinger's cat is often used to illustrate how quantum superpositions become effectively classical through constant interaction with the surrounding environment, a process known as [[Quantum decoherence|decoherence]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Schlosshauer |first=Maximilian |title=Decoherence and the Quantum-to-Classical Transition |publisher=Springer |year=2007 |isbn=978-3-540-35773-5}}</ref> In a realistic setting, the enormous number of atoms in the cat, the measuring device, and the surrounding air are constantly exchanging energy and information with one another. This causes the phase relationships between the "live cat" and "dead cat" components of the wave function to disperse into an astronomically large number of environmental degrees of freedom, making interference between the two branches effectively unobservable in practice. The superposition does not disappear—it spreads beyond any hope of detection—and the system then behaves, for all practical purposes, like an ordinary statistical mixture well before any human observer opens the box.

A helpful analogy is to think of dropping a single drop of ink into a large glass of water. At first the drop is sharp and distinct, but within seconds the ink disperses until no trace of the original boundary can be seen, even though every ink molecule is still present in the water. [[Quantum decoherence|Decoherence]] works similarly: the quantum coherence of the superposition is not destroyed, but is diluted across so many particles that it becomes completely undetectable. Experiments creating mesoscopic "[[cat state]]s" in photons, trapped ions, and [[superconducting quantum computing|superconducting circuits]] probe this boundary by measuring how rapidly coherence degrades as the size and complexity of the superposition is increased.{{citation needed}}

Rationale: The article currently mentions decoherence only in passing (and in the video caption) but never explains it as a concept or links to Quantum decoherence in the body text. This subsection fills that gap with sourced content backed by Schlosshauer (2007), a standard textbook reference on decoherence, and adds an accessible ink-drop analogy to help general readers understand why macroscopic superpositions are not observed in practice. The content is consistent with WP:NPOV, WP:V, and WP:NOR. Rogerbubba (talk) 12:35, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

  • Oppose as written. The second paragraph is a non-starter, offering little in the way of clarification. The first paragraph is related to an important modern consideration in the problem, but I do not think explains it clearly enough for inclusion. It risks giving the impression that decoherence makes the cat become one of the two macroscopic states, or that superposition just spreads until it is no longer present. That seems to risk the wrong intuition. Decoherence is relevant because the live/dead cat states become correlated with different states of the environment. When the environmental states associated with the two possibilities become nearly orthogonal, interference becomes suppressed between the alive/dead states. Thus the cat/apparatus subsystem behaves like a classical probabilistic mixture. But the global quantum state need not have collapsed, and decoherence itself does not select a single outcome. It explains why interference between macroscopically distinct alternatives is not observed, but does not by itself resolve the measurement problem. Sławomir Biały (talk) 14:16, 5 May 2026 (UTC)
  •  Not done. You are autoconfirmed and can edit the page directly...but in this case, don't. Wikipedia is written by human beings, not computers. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 15:29, 5 May 2026 (UTC)