Schrodinger's Cat
Created | Updated Jun 6, 2010
The infamous thought experiment of Schrodinger's Cat came into existence in 1935. The Schrodinger in question is one Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger. The experiment is well known to anyone who has read Dirk Gently's Hollistic Detective Agency. It is simply to put a cat in a sealed box with no way to observe it, along with a Geiger counter, a hammer, a sample of radioactive material, and Hydrocyanic acid in a bottle. These are set up so that at any one point there is a 50% chance that an atom will decay and trigger the Geiger counter, which will in turn trigger the fall of the hammer onto the bottle of acid. The break of this bottle will kill the cat. The reason that this is still remembered today is that without any means of observing the cat, is the cat alive or dead? The answer is no answer. The cat does not exist as alive or dead until it is observed. In other words,
1. At a quantum level all events are governed by probabilities.
2. This means all events are governed by probabilities.
3. These probabilities aren't resolved into events until they are observed.
4. The act of observation collapses the probability waveform, and the cat is neither alive or dead until it's observed.
5. Schrodinger was apparently not a cat person.
Then in 1957, Hugh Everett formulated the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. This in application to the experiment means that at the point of observation, the two possibilities resolve into two differant events that one branch off from each other, one can not be observed from the other. Simply, at the point of observation, two universes form. In one, the cat is alive, and in the other, the cat is dead. Both states of the cat persist, but they are decoherent from each other. In other words, you can't get there from here. This experiment has, quite obviously never been actually performed, and the repeated gassing of cats in the name of science is probably forbidden. This does, however, beg the question of what the experience is like for the cat in question.
1. At a quantum level all events are governed by probabilities.
2. This means all events are governed by probabilities.
3. These probabilities aren't resolved into events until they are observed.
4. The act of observation collapses the probability waveform, and the cat is neither alive or dead until it's observed.
5. Schrodinger was apparently not a cat person.
Then in 1957, Hugh Everett formulated the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. This in application to the experiment means that at the point of observation, the two possibilities resolve into two differant events that one branch off from each other, one can not be observed from the other. Simply, at the point of observation, two universes form. In one, the cat is alive, and in the other, the cat is dead. Both states of the cat persist, but they are decoherent from each other. In other words, you can't get there from here. This experiment has, quite obviously never been actually performed, and the repeated gassing of cats in the name of science is probably forbidden. This does, however, beg the question of what the experience is like for the cat in question.
