Its reality will only ‘collapse’ into one alternative or the other upon being observed. An outside observer will only know which fate is real by opening the box before that, the cat is in something called superposition, potentially either dead or alive. If no radioactivity is detected, the cat survives and may live in ill-tempered indolence for many years. If a monitor inside the box detects radioactive energy, the vial is shatters and the cat dies a slow, horrible death. In the simplified version, and you know you’re in the deep end of the pool when even the thought experiment needs to be simplified, there’s a cat locked in a box with a vial of poison and a radioactive source. When attempting to understand Sean Carroll’s new book Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, we might as well start with every dog-lover’s favorite thought experiment: Schrödinger’s Cat.
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