From Thought Experiment to Qubit: Schrödinger's Cat at Ninety

In 1935, Schrödinger introduced the cat as a reductio ad absurdum of quantum superposition. Ninety years later, “cat states” — superpositions of coherent states with opposite phases — are a practical tool in quantum computing. Bosonic cat qubits can bias bit-flip errors exponentially with photon number under appropriate stabilisation, and are a serious candidate architecture for fault-tolerant quantum computation. The cat is no longer a paradox. It is a qubit.

27 January 2025 · 10 min · Sebastian Spicker

Non-Commutative Pre-Schoolers

Socks before shoes is a useful analogy for order-dependent operations. It does not explain quantum uncertainty, and infant sequence memory is not evidence of group-theoretic understanding. The shared structure is narrower: changing operation order can change, or prevent, the result.

13 November 2023 · 5 min · Sebastian Spicker