Schrodingers cat

[druiaghtagh]

In simple terms, what is this all about please?.

[Sequin]

A cat is put in an opaque box with a mechanism that releases poisonous gas in response to a random event, such as the decay of a radioactive particle. When the box is closed, is the cat alive or dead?

[Skids]

Its a demonstration of quantum theory of superposition. Obviously.
"Schr�dinger's cat serves to demonstrate the apparent conflict between what quantum theory tells us is true about the nature and behavior of matter on the microscopic level and what we observe to be true about the nature and behavior of matter on the macroscopic level."

It involves a cat in a box in which is also a mechanism to kill the cat should a random event inside the box set it off. Because we, the observers of the demonstration, don't know if that random event has occured or not, we don't know whether the cat is dead or not. According to quantum law, because we don't know if the cat is dead or alive, the cat is both dead and alive. When we open the box and find out, we have effected the demonstration so we would never know if the cat would have lived or died if unobserved.

[magicdice]

greg egan wrote a great (science-fiction) novel including this as a theme, can't remember what it was but it really cleared it all up in my head as well as being an interesting read with a strong plotline and a lovely style

[Peter Pedant]

Its sort of to get you to think about quantum theory. One way is to sort of write

Kittie = 1 x (alive) + 0 x (dead) - this kittie is alive by the way, or...

kittie = 0 x (alive) + 1 (dead) - dead kittie i regret to say

alive and dead are quantum states by the way, and so the cat in the box is:

kittie = x (alive) + y (dead), where x and y are unknown but can take values 0 or 1.

and you sort of say either - kool!

or, hey thelma this schrodinger is a krayzee kittie killa! ya garda call da police!

anyway thats what I think it is about.

[druiaghtagh]

Thankyou all for your answers, magicdice ,if you can remeber the book you mentoned i would love to read it, thanks.

[magicdice]

it's called quarantine:

a bit about the book

and also a nice little review here

it's definitely worth a read - i read it about 3 or 4 years ago and when we covered quantum physics a few weeks ago in physics, it all made sense. also, greg egan is a genius