The Cat in the Box

Mort La Brecque

Phil Maguire, Rebecca Maguire

We reopen Erwin Schrodinger's thought experiment involving a cat in an informationally impenetrable box. A common view is that the cat enters a superposition of alive/dead because of a lack of observation, leading to uncertainty about the state of the cat. We, on the other hand, argue that the cat only enters a superposition if everything about the cat is known prior to the box being closed. The superposition results from a lack of uncertainty inside the box. Rather than interpreting this state of affairs as a live and dead cat interacting with each other, we suggest that the more natural interpretation is that of an inability to precisely position events within spacetime due to the lack of uncertainty. We clarify how stable measurement depends on a diversified portfolio of statistical uncertainty, and how the lack of such uncertainty in Schrodinger's box precludes stabilization.

David Papineau

By way of an example, Lewis imagines your being invited to join Schrodinger’s cat in its box for an hour. This box will either fill up with deadly poison fumes or not, depending on whether or not some radioactive atom decays, the probability of decay within an hour being 50%. The invitation is accompanied with some further incentive to comply (Lewis sets it up so there is a significant chance of some pretty bad but not life-threatening punishment if you don’t get in the box). Lewis argues that the many minds theory implies that you should get in the box with the cat, despite this making it 50% likely you will die.

Olimpiu G. Urcan

Gabriela Radulescu

Schrodinger's conceptual model of probable described a closed box containing a cat and a vial filled with a radioactive, poisonous substance. Only if one atom decayed and emitted an electron, the vial would break. The chances that this would happen and the cat would die or that it would not and the cat would continue to live are 50-50. What does this mean? In the everyday world of common reality there is no such thing as a half-dead or half-alive cat, irrespective of the presence of an observer. In quantum physics, however, either both probabilities (of a dead cat and of a living cat) contain equal (in separate worlds), or neither holds valid unless the observer opens the box and allows one of them to crystallize into reality. In the quantum world, the cat is neither dead nor alive, but somehow lying in an indeterminate state until