Schrödinger’s Cat is often used to illustrate the paradoxical nature of quantum mechanics, but does this thought experiment accurately reflect the complexities of quantum theory, or does it simplify them to the point of misunderstanding?
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The ELI5 is that Schrödinger thought the whole “quantum thing” was stupid, so he came up with an experiment to illustrate how stupid he thought it all was. That’s why the experiment doesn’t make any sense – it’s *not supposed to*.
Schrödinger’s cat was a thought experiment meant to illustrate how non-sensical quantum mechanics is.
To show that it clearly had to be wrong.
Quantum mechanics was, to put it mildly, contentious when it was first postulated.
So it doesn’t just oversimplify a complex theory, it intends to disprove it by appealing to intuition.
The thought experiment can be adjusted to make more intuitive sense if we redefine what ‘observation’ means. In popular media ‘observation’ refers to a conscious being opening the box. Many sources are hellbent on somehow mixing people and consciousness into the whole topic. Perhaps this was also the prevailing intuition back in the day.
Instead, if we consider the first interaction made with the the decay product (which either kills or doesnt kill the cat) to be an observation then there is no paradox. The decay particle is released from a decaying atom, and it will either be observed by the detector which sets off the events that kill the cat, or it goes somewhere else. Before the detector makes the observation, both future states are ‘possible’.
I think it does make one type of misunderstanding, where in the story the “box” is a magic material that splits a region of space from the rest of the universe perfectly and not any actual sort of box, so it leads people to think it’s just the human looking that mattered, not reconnecting the space to interact with the world. So you get the mysticism of “observers” that people mistakenly hype up
No it was a joke Schrodinger was trying to point out how stupid quantum mechanics was. The idea that the universe needs people to observe it to become real is not science.
As much as it is meant to show how silly it is, it still illustrates it well enough for practical purposes.
It’s worth noting that mainstream quantum mechanics is ***virtual.*** As in their is no universally accepted and proven concept of for what is actually mechanically happening (e.g.. what *is* wave function collapse in real life, how is it powered, how does it break some other fundamental laws etc. etc).
Since we cannot ever see what is actually happening and the math behind it works, then it “may as well be true”.
Given this, the cat example is close enough to understand the concept.
It’s not really accurate and it makes people think they understand quantum mechanics when they don’t. It’s ome of those ‘The more you know about it, the more you realize you don’t know.’
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