{"id":244182,"date":"2026-09-18T02:24:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T07:24:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/what-kills-schrodingers-cat-underground-experiment-rules-out-gravity-model-for-quantum-decoherence"},"modified":"2026-09-18T02:24:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T07:24:08","slug":"what-kills-schrodingers-cat-underground-experiment-rules-out-gravity-model-for-quantum-decoherence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/what-kills-schrodingers-cat-underground-experiment-rules-out-gravity-model-for-quantum-decoherence","title":{"rendered":"What kills Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s cat? Underground experiment rules out gravity model for quantum decoherence"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Somewhere between the microscopic realm of elementary particles and the macroscopic world of human beings, something strange happens: The rules of quantum physics, which work so exquisitely for tiny atoms, seem to lose their grip as objects grow larger. Pondering where and how this shift from small-scale quantum fuzziness to everyday sharp certainty happens gives rise to thought-experiment oddities like Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s famous dead-and-alive cat. The process by which quantum phenomena like superposition\u2014the paradoxical affliction of Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s cat\u2014fade into the classical reality we experience is known as decoherence.<\/p>\n

Now, a new experiment has narrowed the field of possible explanations for decoherence, in particular ruling out a prominent theory linking gravity to the process. The results appeared in a paper<\/a> in the New Journal of Physics<\/i> in June 2026.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the deepest questions in modern physics is why the strange quantum behavior that governs atoms and elementary particles seems to disappear in the macroscopic world we experience every day,\u201d says FQxI member Catalina Curceanu, director of research and spokesperson for the VIP Collaboration at the National Laboratory of Frascati of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN-LNF) in Italy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Somewhere between the microscopic realm of elementary particles and the macroscopic world of human beings, something strange happens: The rules of quantum physics, which work so exquisitely for tiny atoms, seem to lose their grip as objects grow larger. Pondering where and how this shift from small-scale quantum fuzziness to everyday sharp certainty happens gives [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}