Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act of superposing or the state of being superposed.
  • noun Geology The principle that in a group of stratified sedimentary rocks the lowest were the earliest to be deposited.
  • noun Physics The combination of two or more physical states, such as waves, to form a new physical state in accordance with the superposition principle.
  • transitive verb To superpose.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act of superposing; a placing above or upon; a lying or being situated above or upon something else.
  • noun In botany, same as anteposition, 2.
  • noun Specifically, in geology, noting the relations of stratified formations to one another from the point of view of the relative time of their deposition.
  • noun 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.
  • noun In the early church, an addition to or extension of a fast; a fast longer than the ordinary fast.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The act of superposing, or the state of being superposed.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The placing of one thing on top of another
  • noun geology The deposition of one stratum over another; the principle that in a series of sedimentary strata, the lower strata are the older

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the placement of one thing on top of another
  • noun (geology) the deposition of one geological stratum on another
  • noun (geology) the principle that in a series of stratified sedimentary rocks the lowest stratum is the oldest
  • noun (geometry) the placement of one object ideally in the position of another one in order to show that the two coincide

Etymologies

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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 2009

  • 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.

    Are Changes Brewing and How Does the Mind Fit In? 2008

  • 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.

    Damn Duck 2008

  • 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?

    Damn Duck 2008

  • 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.

    Are Changes Brewing and How Does the Mind Fit In? 2008

  • 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 Third Choice (ID Hypothesis) 2007

  • 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.

    CreationWiki - Recent changes [en] 2009

  • And one of the crazy consequences of quantum theory is that we can put an ion into something called a superposition state.

    The Omega Theory Mark Alpert 2011

  • And one of the crazy consequences of quantum theory is that we can put an ion into something called a superposition state.

    The Omega Theory Mark Alpert 2011

  • We are getting better at keeping things in superposition.

    Are Changes Brewing and How Does the Mind Fit In? 2008

Comments

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  • "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.

    April 28, 2011

  • 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.

    October 9, 2011