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Physicists separate a particle and its property at quantum level - Printable Version

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Physicists separate a particle and its property at quantum level - Magical Realist - Oct 21, 2026

Finally an empirical demonstration of the objective distinction between an object's noumenality and its phenomenality. Kant must be dancing a jig now!

"Think of a physical object. An apple, for example. Now imagine taking the red color off the apple, sending the apple down one hallway, and sending the redness down another. That is essentially what quantum physicists just did with a photon. It is called the Quantum Cheshire Cat effect. In Alice in Wonderland, the cat vanishes and leaves only its grin behind. In a controlled laboratory setting, researchers managed to send a particle down one path while sending its physical property—like its spin or polarization—down an entirely different route. Classical physics assumes an object and its traits are perfectly fused. A ball cannot separate from its roundness. But at the subatomic level, that rule breaks. By operating incredibly precise quantum detectors, researchers proved they could manipulate a particle separately from its own attributes without disturbing the overall system. If an object does not actually need to carry its own properties, the methods we use to encode and transmit data for quantum computing just changed completely."---"Evolved Chimp" Facebook


RE: Physicists separate a particle and its property at quantum level - Syne - Oct 21, 2026

"We want to correct this by showing that different results are obtained if a quantum system is measured in different ways and that the original interpretation of the quantum Cheshire cat only comes about if you combine the results of these different measurements in a very specific way, and ignore this measurement-related change," said Holger Hofmann, a professor at Hiroshima University.
- https://phys.org/news/2024-01-quantum-cheshire-cat-particles-properties.html

The proposal of quantum Cheshire cat has received some criticism.[9] Popescu, one of the authors of the original paper, acknowledged it was not well received by all of the referees who first reviewed the original work.[9]

As the quantum Cheshire cat effect is subjected to analysis of the trajectory before measurement, its conclusion depends on the interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is still an open problem in physics. Some authors reach different conclusions for this effect or disregard the effect completely.[10] It has been suggested that the quantum Cheshire cat is just an apparent paradox raising from misinterpreting wave interference.[11] Other authors consider that it can be reproduced classically.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Cheshire_cat#Interpretations_and_criticism