Schrödinger's Cat could be visible after all

[cali]

Schrödinger's Cat could be (almost) as easy to observe as the internet's millions of LOLcats, with confirmation that there may be a way round Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle after all.

Researchers at the University of Rochester and the University of Ottawa have used a comparatively new technique to directly measure for the first time the polarization states of light. Their work has implications for the weird Uncertainty Principle, which states that certain properties of a quantum system can be known only poorly if other related properties are known precisely.

The direct measurement technique was first developed in 2011 by scientists at Canada's National Research Council to measure the wavefunction - a way of determining the state of a quantum system. Such direct measurement had long been believed to be impossible on the basis that you could never fully understand a quantum system through direct observation.

Now, the Canadian researchers have come up with a parallel result - that it is possible to measure key related variables, known as 'conjugate' variables, of a quantum particle or state directly. The discovery is applicable to qubits, the building blocks of quantum information theory, as polarization states of light can be used to encode information.

Read more at http://www.tgdaily.com/general-science-brief/69893-schr-dingers-cat-could-be-visible-after-all#wbiK8X3XtDGCSsDh.99