Anytime I read about it or when I hear people using it to describe a situation I feel stupid as shit. And how is it can be used to quantumcomputers?
Help a dumbass out. Thanks.
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Erwin Schrodinger was one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics. He along with many other scientists were breaking new ground on the regular, and as a consequence of that, they were discovering and conceptualizing all sorts of newly-discovered concepts.
One of these was the concept of “superposition.” In the quantum realm, if a particle may exist in many different states, it acts as if it exists in a sort of sum total of all those possible states. It takes a “superposition” of all those different states, and it remains in that superposition until it “collapses” into a single state due to some interaction with an observer or its environment. Just the act of measuring the particle will collapse the superposition.
This is, of course, hugely unintuitive because things in our human-scale macro world do not behave like this at all. They behave classically, as if they only ever have one state at a given moment. So something like “superposition” was just as unintuitive to Schrodinger as it is to you and me.
Schrodinger proposed the cat as a sort of thought experiment to criticize the absurdity of superposition. He proposed that you put a cat in a box with a device. The device monitors the nucleus of an unstable atom, and if/when that atom decays, the device will spew out poison gas, killing the cat. Now, outside the box, we don’t know whether/when that atom decayed–and by extension we don’t know whether the cat is alive or dead–until we open the box. If we played by quantum mechanical rules, the cat is both alive AND dead until we open the box to check, at which point the quantum supercat collapses into a regular–living *or* dead–cat. Now, we know that cats don’t exist in a living-and-dead superposition, so this thought experiment is intended to poke at the absurdity of the concept.
We now know that superposition *is* in fact how things work on those very small scales, (and we know that the thought experiment isn’t apt for a number of other reasons) but Schrodinger’s cat has become a colorful illustration for a lot of day-to-day scenarios involving chance and decision-making.
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