No signal underground: Scientists challenge a decades-old idea about how quantum reality breaks down. Schrödinger’s cat has a new problem

While Schrödinger's famed cat was simply a thought experiment, the actual physics question being asked in the thought experiment remains quite real – namely, why does the quantum realm behave so differently than our familiar classical world?

According to quantum mechanics, particles and other systems at the microscopic level can be described by a combination of potential states, a phenomenon called superposition.