What’s Schrödinger’s Cat, and Why Is It Both Dead & Alive? 🐱📦
Schrödinger’s Cat is a famous thought experiment in quantum mechanics. Imagine a cat inside a box with a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter, and a vial of poison. If the atom decays, the Geiger counter detects it, breaking the vial and killing the cat. If it doesn’t decay, the cat stays alive.
But here’s the twist: Quantum mechanics says that until we observe the system, the atom exists in a superposition—both decayed and not decayed at the same time. Since the cat’s fate depends on the atom, it too is both dead and alive simultaneously!
Only when we open the box does the superposition “collapse” into one definite state—either the cat is dead or alive.
Schrödinger created this paradox to highlight the weirdness of quantum theory. In reality, large objects like cats don’t behave this way, but at the quantum level, particles do exist in multiple states until measured.
This experiment challenges our understanding of reality: Does observation create reality? 🤯
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