I don’t understand..
When we observe it, we can define it’s state right? But it was never in both states. It was only in one, we just didn’t know which one it is. It’s not like if I go back in time and open the box at a different time, that the outcome will be different. It is one of the 2 outcomes, we just don’t know which one until we look. And when we look we discover which one it was, it was never the 2 at the same time. This is what’s been bugging me. Can anyone help explain it? Or am I thinking about it wrong?
In: Physics
At the quantum scale, the starting atom’s particles are in a superposition of having both decayed and remained stable. It is not a matter of not knowing whether or not it decayed it is in both a state of having decayed and not decayed at the same time. When the radiated particle interacts with another particle, that particle too is in a state of superposition, having interacted and not interacted with the radiating particle. This is accepted physics.
Now continue this chain reaction until it scales up into the world we observe. Everything should be in a state of superposition, but it’s not. There is one definite measured outcome. The idea of this thought experiment is to take the theory of how particles interact and scale it up to the macro sized world that we understand. Clearly this doesn’t happen at the macro scale.
So how can physics explain how and why something that starts in a superposition of many states ends up in a single state? That’s called *the measurement problem* and is an open, unanswered problem in physics.
Another way to look at is to ask the question from a different perspective. How is the thought experiment wrong? As of right now, physics is not able to explain how it’s possible for the cat to be in a single state of alive or dead before “opening the box.”
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