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Published online 20 January 2000 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news000120-10
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How decoherence killed Schrödinger's cat
By juggling with a trapped atom, physicists have been able to probe the mysterious quantum-mechanical process that links the quantum to the everyday, classical world.
The inventors of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century had no illusions about its weirdness. In 1935 the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger illustrated this by reference to a cat held at the mercy of a device that could kill it.
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