If you have no cat, use a virus instead. probably not said by Erwin Schrödinger
Schrödinger’s intention was to illuminate the paradoxes of the quantum world. But superposition (the existence of a thing in two or more quantum states simultaneously) is real and is, for example, the basis of quantum computing. A pair of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, now propose to do what Schrödinger could not, and put a living organism into a state of quantum superposition.
Note that they are not attempting to put the virus in an alive/dead superposition.
A virus is a chiral object. Is diffraction through a grating gerade or ungerade in space? If one shoots a stream of chiral objects through a grating, diffracting their de Broglie waves, do the objects racemize?
One need not use a virus. Resolved norbornenone, bicyclo[2.2.1]hept-5-en-2-one, has an optical rotation of 1146 degrees, low freezing and boiling points, MW = 108.138, and is rigid. Seeded supersonic expansion into hard vacuum would obtain a lovely cryogenic dilute molecular beam. Then, we could know. Hund’s paradox, too.