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.
In: 39
Schrodinger’s cat isn’t a theory exactly, it’s a thought experiment that was made precisely to show how weird quantum mechanics could be.
The basic premise is that there are different states that a quantum system can have, we’ll call them A and B, but that there is also a weird quantum situation called “superposition”, where you aren’t in A or B, but a combination of them that is determined by the relative probabilities of A and B.
Schrodinger’s cat takes that, and scales it up to a regular size. You have a box with a cat, a bottle of poison, a Geiger counter attached to a hammer, and a single atom of a radioactive material. If the radioactive material decays, then the Geiger counter clicks, swinging the hammer, releasing the poison, and killing the cat.
Radioactivity is one of the situations where a superposition can happen, where you have the two final states, “decayed atom” and “not decayed atom”, but the quantum weirdness introduces the third superposition state of both decayed and not decayed.
So the cat is now also in a superposition, being both alive and dead at the same time.
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