Scientists catch Schrödinger's cat with quantum physics

Schrodinger's cat, the good ole thought experiment that's been twisting (non-Quantum physicist) brains for decades. Scientists might have just caught it. Or not. Typical. What you see above is a combined image where a stencil was bombarded with cosmic rays photons, but the photons that generated the image actually never interacted with the stencil -- stay with us. It was separate photons (which shared the same quantum state as the ones that hit the camera) which arrived at the stencil. The science goes that when two separate particles are entangled, their physical properties appear to correlate and they share a single quantum state.

Researchers at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna created yellow and red pairs of entangled photons. While yellow photons were fired at the cat stencil, the red photons were sent to the camera. Quantum entanglement could offer a huge array of benefits, including highly advanced data security and quantum communication, which sounds equal parts complicated and futuristic.