Ok my brain is officially jello trying to understand that thought experiment. Cat in a box with a radioactive counter and a flask of acid? Is it alive or dead? Can someone sum this up for me in normal speak? It one of those things that have me sitting here crosseyed bumbling my lips with my finger b-b-b-b-b-b-b......
Its only an interpretation of QM. These mysterious interpretations only make things more complicated and hard to understand. Its much simpler to just apply the equations and forget about the stupid interpretations.
Schrodinger's point wasn't that the cat is both alive and dead - his point was that it's silly to think that we can apply quantum principles to every day life. The whole thought experiment exists to point out the absurdity of trying to do this, and yet everything thinks it's supposed to be a genuine representation of the quantum effects on daily life.
Once we observe that the cat is dead and close the box, does it go back to the alive/dead state?
Once we observe that the cat is dead and close the box, does it go back to the alive/dead state?
Except that the maths is way way way too complicated for 99.9% of people to understand. The only thing us norms can do is look at the interpretations.
I had a quantum physicist once tell me that not even quantum physicists really understand quantum physics.
Schrödinger was in the camp of Einstein and Planck and was a classical physicist. He was against the quantum nature of atoms, and came up with his wave equation after formalizing what DeBroglie interpreted as the wave nature of matter. Schrödinger wanted to disprove the discrete states and won the approval of those other more traditional classical physicists with his equation.
On the other side was Bohr, Heisenberg, Born and Pauli. They were the true quantum mechanics physicists that believed strongly in discrete quantum states, i.e. based chiefly on Heisenberg's matrix mechanics. Born was more the mathematician and interpreted Schrödinger's wave equation as more than just waves, but probability outcomes.
This exceedingly frustrated Schrödinger, and so like his ally Einstein, came up with a thought experiment to disprove the probability interpretation of his wave equation once and for all. So he came up with the though experiment of Schrödinger's cat (Einstein came up with these thought experiments all the time).
Schrödinger's cat was supposed to disprove the quantum nature of matter, because it was to be interpreted to be obsurd (how can a cat be both dead and alive?). But in the decades since, it has served to more demonstrate the strangeness of quantum systems. Quantum mechanics, much to the chagrin of Schrödinger, was and is still here to stay. Every prediction it has made has been proven so far. Einstein never liked it, he thought that someday it would be revealed as part of a bigger theory - he didn't like God throwing the dice.. D:
HTH
Since you can't observe it's state, presumably it is both dead and alive.
Now, to me, this concept makes absolutely no sense. Since it can't be both, I will assume it's EITHER dead OR alive, not both. In this case, observing something will not change the outcome.
The way it was explained to me was that it was a box you can't see into. If you open the box, it lets the cat escape, so observing it directly affects the state of it.
A better example was opening a freezer to see if ice had formed. Doing this in a hot environment prevents ice from forming because it lets a bunch of hot air into the freezer. Looking at the state of ice forming has a direct influence on whether or not ice has formed.