Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. The act of superposing or the state of being superposed: "Yet another technique in the forensic specialist's repertoire is photo superposition” ( Patrick Nuyghe).
- n. Geology The principle that in a group of stratified sedimentary rocks the lowest were the earliest to be deposited.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The act of superposing; a placing above or upon; a lying or being situated above or upon something else.
- n. In botany, same as anteposition, 2.
- n. Specifically, in geology, noting the relations of stratified formations to one another from the point of view of the relative time of their deposition. That underlying beds are older than those which cover them is called the law of superposition. The apparent exceptions to this law are those instances in which stratified masses have been so disturbed and overturned since their deposition that older beds have been made to rest upon newer ones.
- n. In geometry, the ideal operation of carrying one magnitude to the space occupied by another, and showing that they can be made to coincide throughout their whole extent. This is the method of Euclid, to which his axiom, that things which coincide are equal, refers; but the use of the word superpose in this sense appears to be due to Auguste Comte (French superposer).
- n. In the early church, an addition to or extension of a fast; a fast longer than the ordinary fast.
Wiktionary
- n. The placing of one thing on top of another
- n. geology The deposition of one stratum over another; the principle that in a series of sedimentary strata, the lower strata are the older
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. The act of superposing, or the state of being superposed.
WordNet 3.0
- n. the placement of one thing on top of another
- n. (geology) the deposition of one geological stratum on another
- n. (geology) the principle that in a series of stratified sedimentary rocks the lowest stratum is the oldest
- n. (geometry) the placement of one object ideally in the position of another one in order to show that the two coincide
Examples
“A simple superposition is not possible, because the knowledge of the weight in the equation of every single factor is unknown to man.”
Climate Engineering, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
“There is no mystery as to how the photon can be in superposition in both space and time if 4D spacetime is considered really real.”
“Penrose had an answer to why large things don't appear in superposition (the more the mass, the faster to Objective Reduction (OR) due to gravitational energy), but he didn't have a ready answer for why observations caused OR.”
“If a cat's life was directly tied to a quantum effect in superposition, would the cat be both alive and dead at the same time?”
“The single electron at the top (in superposition of both spin up and spin down states) is measured, and reduces to a single classical state (e.g. spin down).”
“A simple way to understand this is that the simple meaning of the word superposition is the placement of one thing on top of another.”
“And one of the crazy consequences of quantum theory is that we can put an ion into something called a superposition state.”
“We are getting better at keeping things in superposition.”
“The mechanism that will make this possible is known as superposition, and the switches are referred to as quantum bits.”
“Not only do the two photons serving as qubits in this device have this mix of quantum identities, a state formally called superposition, they are also "entangled.”
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Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘superposition’.
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Words of Science
Your Favorite Words Pertaining to Science.
gravity, constant, interference, velocity, coherence, mass, volume, anatomy, astronomy, cosmology, cosmic microwave ..., cell and 14 more...
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five syllables
ontogenesis, phylogenesis, concatenation, androgenesis, extra textual, inexorably, spagyrically, apophenia, iatrochemist, monocotyloid, morphological, parthenogenic and 941 more...
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Dain's Words
rabble, terminus, archaic, atavism, demiurge, waylay, syzygy, jocoserious, quark, entropy, cinnabar, shamble and 912 more...
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ruzuzu's taxonomy
limit cycle, gyre, oscillation, meander, general adaptatio..., barchan dune, soliton, guilloche, obverse, involute, damaskeening, superposition and 62 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for superposition.
leaden It warms my heart not only to be reminded by the CD&C of the mathematical term superpose, but to learn as well that there’s a French word spelled superposer. Oct 8, 2011
bilby "In Schrodinger's famous thought experiment of the 1930s, a cat would be placed in a sealed box with a device containing atomic material.
A Geiger counter was included to measure radiation if at some point an atom decayed. Should that happen, the Geiger counter would trigger the release of cyanide gas, which would kill the cat.
The idea was that it was impossible to know whether or not the cat was alive or dead without opening the box and observing it, and that until that happened, both realities existed. This became known as superposition."
- Carl Holm, Scientists teleport Schrodinger's cat, abc.net.au, 15 April 2011. Apr 28, 2011