What to do with a cat, a box and a bottle of poison?

Suppose you are so bored as to imagine that you put in a box a cat and a bottle of poison, accompanied by an elaborate contraption that, upon detection of the emission of a radioactive particle, will break the bottle of poison and kill the cat, I think that, although it sounds cruel, there are simpler ways to kill a cat. Well this was what a glorious day in 1935, occurred to the Austrian physicist Erwing Schrödinger and since then he is remembered as "the cat guy", before the almost impossible task of pronouncing his name.

But what purpose can have to put all that in a box, only with the intention of liquidating a poor cat, it turns out that the good of Schrodi, he devised this experiment, IMAGINARY, that did not kill any cat, to exemplify one of the principles less intuitive of quantum mechanics, the superposition of states.

The cat's opinion on this matter

As the world was not complicated enough, back in the first half of the 20th century, a group of physicists came up with the idea of ​​"creating" quantum mechanics, among them: Max Plank, Louis De Broglie, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, John von Neumann, of course ..., Albert Einstein and of course "the cat guy", Erwin Schrödinger. This, then, a new branch of physics, proposes to give an explanation to what happens at the level of the immeasurably small, pretending among other things to explain the fundamental forces that govern the universe.

Schrodi

But what does Schrodi intend to explain with his experiment? Well, it turns out that, in the quantum world, a particle, like the radioactive particle that activates the contraption, can be in one place and another at a time, in the experiment of the cat , we are told that it has a 50/50 chance of being in the box or not and, therefore, being detected by the cats killer device. What implications does this have, since the box is opaque, we do not know what happens inside and after a predefined waiting time, we can affirm that the cat has 50/50 probability of being alive and dead, that is, we can intuit , that the cat is alive and dead at the same time.

One of the most intriguing concepts of quantum mechanics, is the wave function, this indicates the probability that a particle is in a place in space at a specific time, consequently, any point in space has an associated probability that a specific particle is in it.

Let's see again the cat in the box, if we do not open the box, we do not know what exactly happens in it, now, as we do not know what happens, we can say that the murderous particle is and at the same time is not in the box, in Consequently, the cat is alive and dead at the same time, with a 50% probability for both states. And what happens if we open the box, in terms of quantum mechanics, the wave function collapses, showing us the state of the particle and the cat, with 100% certainty, we can say, the device was activated because the particle is in the box and the cat is already in the sky of the cats, or the device was not activated, so the particle is not in the box and the cat is probably furious, but surely alive

Schrodi and the cat, after making peace

Well up to here the cat jokes, if you like, or not, the post, the only way I can know is to collapse the wave function, leaving a comment, certainly there are other interpretations of this experiment which I will talk about later , or not.

Text and original drawings by @amart29, Barcelona, Venezuela, June 2018

Sources:

“La suerte del gato de Schrödinger no la decide el observador”. Tendencias21, 21 de junio de 2017
“Gato de Schrödinger”. Wikipedia.
"Schrödinger's cat". Wikipedia.
“El 'gato' de Schrödinger, vivo y muerto en dos sitios a la vez”. El Mundo, 27 de mayo de 2016.
“EL GATO DE SCHRÖDINGER”. Física Fundamental.

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