Schrodinger's Cat Paradox

 Schrodinger's Cat: Alive or Dead?

**What actually happened in the Schrodinger's Cat experiment**

Schrodinger's cat. If there's a feline that's been mourned by physicists and celebrated by science memers out there on the internet, it's this cat we're talking about!! 

Before we dive right into this 'not-so-cheerful' experiment, this is in fact, only a thought experiment which was brought up in 1935 by an Austrian-Irish physicist Erwin Schrodinger, who was, let's just say, particularly NOT very fond of cats!!! 

This thought experiment was actually an amazing paradigm that showed the weirdness and inconsistency of quantum mechanics in physics, which we'd be elaborating later on in this post.

What was the Experiment?

As we've noted earlier, this experiment is a thought experiment, which means, it was never practically conducted or tested in real. 

The experiment was a simple one: a cat placed inside a sealed box along with a glass bottle filled with a deadly poison. There's also a radioactive substance and a detector in the box. The detector is again connected in series with a hammer that'll let loose if the detector detects radioactive decay of the substance. The apparatus is all perfectly set up and we close the box. What's supposed to happen is that whenever the radioactive substance decays, the detector detects the activity and will let go of the hammer, which is going to smash the glass bottle by releasing the poison, thus, killing the cat. 

But here's the deal: the cat could only be killed if the radioactive substance decays, and the substance has exactly a 50% chance of decaying while in the box. This means that there's an equal chance of the cat getting killed or living. Whatever happens, the final state of the cat won't be known unless we open the box to find out. Until then, the cat may be dead or alive.

Quantum Superposition

But what did Schrodinger actually try to prove from this experiment? 

According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the general idea is that a particle can exist in all its possible states simultaneously until the time of its observation! This means that the particle is said to be in a superposition state until it's observed or measured by an external entity. 

For instance, if a particle is given three different paths as choices. Logically, we're sure that eventually, the particle is going to somehow end up in any one of the three paths. It's definitely not going to be in all of the three paths at the same time until it's observed. But, quantum mechanics solutions predict that it can actually happen!!! 

This effect is called quantum superposition, where a particle can exist at different points or states at the same time, just like a wave!!! This is where wave-particle duality comes in. This interpretation suggests that whenever a particle is observed, the particle suddenly collapses or come to any one of the single states. So, the state which we were observing was only attained fully by that particle at the same time when we started observing it!!  

Inference 

So what about the cat inside the box in this case? 

Well, if we are talking in terms of quantum mechanics, then the cat will be in a superposition state, which means that it will be both dead and alive at the same time. Unless we open the box to find out its single precise state or result, according to quantum theory, the cat is both dead and alive!! 

But here's the catch, we know that the cat can't be both dead AND alive at the same time. It can be either dead OR alive, but definitely not both. This was the key point that Schrodinger was trying to prove. He always thought that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics did not make sense and that it didn't cope up with the classical theory (Newtonian physics).

However, this famous Schrodinger's cat paradox has led physicists into sculpting famous hypothetical theories like the Many-Worlds interpretation, which predicts that every universe or system has its own different version that exists in all of its possible states. This means that there is earth out there that contains no life at all or probably life that is too advanced in technology, like the existence of aliens. 

This theory also predicts the possibility of parallel universes, which may be entirely different from ours!! Whatever it is, physicists haven't fully figured out the ''mechanism'' of quantum mechanics, so.... more is yet to come ;)

 To know more about Multiverses and Parallel Universes in detail, CLICK HERE