Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
In the Shroedinger Cat Paradox, a cat is penned up in a steel box, along with a diabolical device that consists of a Geiger counter containing a tiny bit of radioactive material, an amount so small that perhaps within an hour one atom decays, but with equal probability will not decay.
If an atom does decay, the counter tube discharges, triggers a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid, and kills the cat.
After an hour, is the cat alive or dead? Until the box is opened ‑‑ thereby destroying the experiment altogether ‑‑ the wretched cat exists in the unenviable state of being both alive and dead.
Shroedinger meant his paradox to be a sort of absurd thought experiment to show that at some level quantum mechanics must fail, that it couldn't apply to the macroscopic world.
The problems that Einstein had with quantum mechanics is that he used the commonsense notion that a particle has a definite history. And that a particle has a definite location. But, it must be taken into account that a particle has an infinite set of histories. A famous thought experiment called Shroedinger's cat helps to illustrate this concept. Let's say that a cat is placed in a sealed box and a gun is pointed at it. The gun will only go off if a radioactive nucleus decays. There is exactly a 50% chance of this happening. Later on, before the box is opened, there are two possibilities of what happened to the cat: the gun did not go off, and the cat is alive, or the gun did go off, and the cat is dead. Before the box is opened, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time. The cat has two separate histories.
Originally posted by paulzag
Oh and from an investors perspective the cat is dead. Until proven otherwise.
Wrappers may disagree.
Originally posted by tonyd
In this instance there is a 83% chance that the goldfish will be dead, indicating that our universe is biased towards dead goldfish.