'Quantum cats' make molecular physics adorable

Quantum physics is one of the most fascinating sciences for a lot of reasons, including its adorable (and occasionally morbid) reliance on cats.

The cats, of course, are hypothetical — Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead at the same time until it is observed. But when physicists replicated the "cat state" in their laboratory in 2005 — six atoms simultaneously "spinning up" and "spinning down" (or to keep with the metaphor, "alive" and "dead") — we began to learn a lot more about the inner workings of molecules.

Recently, Stanford scientists had a breakthrough by shooting a two-atom molecule of iodine with a laser, cleaving it in two. That energy makes the molecule both excited and not excited, simultaneously — the so-called "cat state." Then the researchers shot a second X-ray laser at the molecule in order to "create what was essentially an X-ray hologram of concentric rings," Gizmodo writes. "It took a bit of additional clever processing to refine the details, but they ended up with a series of snapshots of the molecule at various points in time. And they were able to string those snapshots together to create a stop-motion movie."

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But all that science talk is admittedly lacking in the aforementioned feline cuteness. Get an adorable dose of cat quantum physics in the explainer video, below. Jeva Lange