Schroedinger Cat?

Question

Will someone give me a detailed but still relatively understandable explanation of the Schroedinger's Cat theory? Thanks!

Answer 1

Yikes, I'll try, but it's tricky even for me! And I've read a lot about it because it fascinates me!

OK, the idea is that you have a cat in a box. The cat is not visible to you, the experimenter. In this box is a small amount of radioactive material and a geiger counter. If one atom decays even the tiniest amount and the geiger counter catches this, a tiny flask of poison is broken and the cat is killed. The "weird" part (hah) comes in here. Whether or not the atom decays is strictly a probability issue. However, using quantum mechanics, the cat would neither be alive nor dead until someone opened up the box to give it a "label" - to observe it and quantify it as alive or dead. It would exist in a state of "alive/dead"ness, sort of.

Schrodinger used this as a way of pointing out that sometimes quantum mechanics just doesn't work for a given situation.

Answer 2

The Schroedinger cat theory basically tries to explain the concept to put it simply that a true or false state of being can also have a dual state of part true and part false also. But the ultimate answer to a true or false statement is dependent upon the interaction of you and the state. Meaning you don't know what the outcome is until you observe it. In the cat experiment, a cat is put under a box. There is a button to push. When you push the button, 50% of the time it will release a poison and kill the cat in the box and 50% of the time it will not. So there are classically only two choice. Dead or alive. True or false. The theory goes that until you open the box the cat statistically even to be dead or alive, so the theory is that it is both dead and alive at the same time. This is its state (true or false/dead or alive) until you observe the result in the box. This theory implies that the cat can be any degree of dead or alive. The result is only verifiable and tangible when you use your senses to detect it (ie-seeing, smelling, touching). This opens up the big question that all possibilities are possible and some have shown that you can bias the outcome to what ever you want by applying pressures to push it toward what you want.

Answer 3

We place a living cat into a box, along with a device containing a vial of food. There is, in the chamber, a very small amount of a radioactive substance. If even a single atom of the substance decays during the test period, a relay mechanism will trip a hammer, which will, in turn, break the vial and feed the cat. The observer cannot know whether or not an atom of the substance has decayed, and consequently, cannot know whether the vial has been broken, the food released, and the cat fed. Since we cannot know, the cat is both fed and unfed according to quantum law, in a superposition of states. It is only when we break open the box and learn the condition of the cat that the superposition is lost, and the cat becomes one or the other (fed or hungry). This situation is sometimes called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox: the observation or measurement itself affects an outcome, so that it can never be known what the outcome would have been if it were not observed.

Answer 4

Say you have big cardboard TV box (one of those 50 in CRT TVs) and say you put your favorite cat Jinxy in it. Now close the box and walk away. Do you know exactly where the cat is right now? Well you can always guess, but that won't really be a scientifically viable answer (although it is still probable that your guess will be close). So what do you do? You want try to find ways to measure the cats exactly location so a certain degree of accuracy? So you cut out two small holes on top of the box and you shove a flashlight in one and poke through the other. However just by poking holes and shining a flashlight beam on Jinxy is probably going to have some affect (like scarying the daylight out of him - pun inteneded) and so he is going to start running around inside the box getting all restless and scared. Ofcourse there are other ways to determine cats exact location like getting your laser distance meter or using couple of feeler sticks to feel your way inside your box. But the simple fact is that no matter how you try to determine Jinxy's location, the act of measuring is going to change your expected result (the poor cat doesn't want to give up any of it's 9 lives). And this, my friend, is the Schroedinger's cat theory in most the simplistic terms.

Answer 5

I think most folks who have answered so far have missed an important part of the point.
Not only is it true that we can't tell if the cat is living or dead until we "observe" it, but the real bizzare part of quantum mechanics is that the *way* we make the observation, can change the outcome; and not always in a predictable way.
This is what Heisenberg was talking about; when you measure something in a way to get a very precise answer, there is another property that will be less precise (e.g. position & momentum).
Strangely enough then, quantum mechanics, described as a cat in a box, says that if we try to verify whether the cat is alive or dead, using different methods, we can get different results!

ps: Supposedly on Heisenberg's tombstone: "I'm buried somewhere near here."

Answer 6

Schroedinger's Cat is usually very misunderstood. He wasn't talking about an actual cat, it's just an aid to visualisation. The point is that things don't happen until they are observed. Whether you agree with it or not, that was the theory.

Answer 7

Schroedingers theory basically says that you can't monitor or control an experiment without affecting the experiment. For instance, you can't check to see if the light in the fridge stays on when you close the door until you open it.

Answer 8

Another basic thing it proves is that you cannot prove anything untill you have emperically poved it. Like through physical observation, is the cat dead or is it alive? Don't know till you check. It all comes down to probabilities. What's the odds?

Answer 9

Until you open the box, the cat is neither dead or alive but is only probabilities...

Answer 10

theres two great books available on the subject