schrodinger cat?

Question

Can anybody explain this in simple terms?

Answer 1

Here's a crude but simple explanation:

Say you had a cat in sealed box. You put in small amount of radioactive substance that only gives off a few particles of radiation per day. Next to it is a radiation detector that will release a poison that when it detects a radiation particle. Nothing, including the cat, can touch, look at, or interfere with all this.

Now in theory, small particles like protons and neutrons don't have any definite characteristics until you measure them or look at them. Same with an atom that's ready to decay. They are in limbo. So, the radiactive substance is in limbo, neither decayed or not, you can't tell. So maybe the cat is sort of half dead, half alive, until you look at it. Is this cat alive or dead if noone looks at it?

Answer 2

This is an experiment where a cat is isolated from external interference (in a box, cannot be seen or else), the state of the cat can only be known as being alive or being dead (or sleeping, or running if you want).

Since finding out (measuring the state, seeing the cat in the case) cannot be done without the observer interfering (seeing, that is the cat is not isolated anymore) with the experiment, then the measurement system (the observer, you in this case) is entangled with the experiment (the observer is part of the experiment itself, which is a bummer).

This is problematic because in science you don't want to interfere with the object of your research.

"The thought experiment serves to illustrate the strangeness of quantum mechanics and the mathematics necessary to describe quantum states. The idea of a particle existing in a superposition of possible states, while a fact of quantum mechanics, is a concept that does not scale to large systems (like cats), which are not indeterminably probabilistic in nature. "