The Famous Cat that belonged to Mr. Schrodinger

Have you heard of Schrodinger’s cat?

She is a poor cat who is trapped in a box (against her will I am sure,) along with a radioactive source and a vial of poison. I have a feeling that if the cat had any say in it, she’d attack Mr. Schrodinger with her claws drawn out, or she may not. But because the cat was only a product of Mr. Schrodinger’s fertile imagination, she meekly obeyed the orders, and got in.

Before I proceed further, I must tell you that this hypothetical cat isn’t fantasy, he is science.

Schrodinger’s cat is a paradox that was divined by a gentleman called Mr. Schrodinger, and hence it is called his cat (their experiments are the only things the scientists eventually end up owning.)
By stuffing this unfortunate hypothetical cat in a box, Schrodinger tried to illustrate the odd phenomenon called the “Quantum Superpositions” or the many possible positions/states that an atom or a sub-atomic particle may exist in, until some bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived scientist decides to observe it. The particle then exhibits any one of the many states it could exist in. This was known as the Copenhagen Interpretation and a lot of scientists at the time (about 80 years ago, in 1935) were totally in love with it. Mr. Schrodinger however thought that the entire theory was hogwash.

So he came up with the idea of a boxed-in cat. Inside his fantastical box, the cat can exist in two “superpositions” – it could either be alive or dead (or in other words, it would be both alive and dead,) and one couldn’t know whether the poor thing were actually alive at a certain point or not, until someone opened the box to observe the cat. Why? Because the radioactive source could start emitting at any moment, and the leak would immediately make the poison escape the vial. (If you are wondering why you’d want to open such a hazardous box, you have a lot more common sense than this particular cat.)

Schrodinger had come up with this hypothetical experiment to make his peers realize how stupid the Copenhagen theory sounded.

The twist in the cat’s tail was that instead of fulfilling Schrodinger’s purpose (which was to snicker at the Copenhagen theory,) his cat ended up becoming one of the most talked about experiments in the area of quantum physics.

PS: Wifey says that Schrodinger could’ve achieved better results by talking about state of his wife’s happiness in the marriage. I am trying to work out why she said that.

https://laughingsquid.com/a-ted-ed-animation-explaining-the-schrodingers-cat-thought-experiment-in-quantum-mechanics/
https://www.sciencealert.com/schrodinger-s-cat-is-now-alive-and-dead-in-two-boxes-at-once-irl-experiment-reveals