00:00The famous thought experiment of Schrodinger's cat goes like this.
00:04You put a cat in a box, and in some way that box is lethal to the cat.
00:09The only important thing there is, like, you can't know if the lethal thing has killed the cat or not.
00:15So until you open the box, the idea is that the cat exists in a state of both life and
00:23death at the same time.
00:25Obviously not true for a cat. A cat is either alive or dead. Doesn't matter if you're looking at it.
00:30Quantum is a different situation.
00:32The idea of being in two states at the same time is called superposition.
00:37And that actually is a thing that quantum particles can do.
00:40More common, the smaller you go.
00:43So scientists are really, really interested in trying to find big ones.
00:46How far can we stretch that two states at the same time kind of thing?
00:51And they recently found a massive one.
00:54Like 7,000 atoms of sodium.
00:57Which is not big on, like, a you-and-me scale, but huge, huge, huge, huge on a quantum scale.
01:04The idea is basically that eventually these things can be used in quantum computers.
01:09Superposition being in two states at the same time allows quantum computers to do two different processes at the same
01:16time.
01:16That's what maximizes how fast they can be.
01:19So if we can get reasonably sized superposition-able particles, and we can stick them in quantum computers, we can
01:28make these things go crazy fast.
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