The physicist Erwin Schrödinger described, back in 1935, one aspect of this strange phenomenon. He placed his cat in a sealed box with a piece of radioactive material which might or might not send out a sub-atomic particle. If it did, the Geiger counter was designed to trigger a release of poisonous gas in the box, and thereby kill his cat. The counter was set up to be triggered just enough to give a 50-50 chance of a particle being detected, and therefore the cat an even chance of being poisoned or not. (In those days, this sort of experiment was acceptable, particularly as it was only a thought experiment.) Radioactive behaviour is unpredictable (except in a general, statistical probability kind of way). There is no rule for working out whether or not the Geiger counter will be triggered. If the sub-atomic event does not occur, the cat lives. Otherwise, it dies. Just as a photon (in that famous experiment from ‘real-life’ physics) will quite happily go through both of two parallel slits in a screen – until someone tries to measure or detect it, at which point what the physicists call ‘the collapse of the wave function’ takes place – the particle can both trigger the poison gas and not trigger the poison gas. That is, until someone looks, Schrödinger’s idea is that his cat, for a while, is both alive and dead!
The physicist Erwin Schrödinger described, back in 1935, one aspect of this strange phenomenon. He placed his cat in a sealed box with a piece of radioactive material which might or might not send out a sub-atomic particle. If it did, the Geiger counter was designed to trigger a release of poisonous gas in the box, and thereby kill his cat. The counter was set up to be triggered just enough to give a 50-50 chance of a particle being detected, and therefore the cat an even chance of being poisoned or not. (In those days, this sort of experiment was acceptable, particularly as it was only a thought experiment.) Radioactive behaviour is unpredictable (except in a general, statistical probability kind of way). There is no rule for working out whether or not the Geiger counter will be triggered. If the sub-atomic event does not occur, the cat lives. Otherwise, it dies. Just as a photon (in that famous experiment from ‘real-life’ physics) will quite happily go through both of two parallel slits in a screen – until someone tries to measure or detect it, at which point what the physicists call ‘the collapse of the wave function’ takes place – the particle can both trigger the poison gas and not trigger the poison gas. That is, until someone looks, Schrödinger’s idea is that his cat, for a while, is both alive and dead!
Schrodinger’s cat describes a paradox in which a cat is located in a sealed black box with a poison sealed capsule inside it. Radioactive source decays and emits radiation, which activates a Geiger counter, The Geiger counter generates a signal to release poison from the capsule and kill the cat. Since the decay of a radioactive source is a random sub atomic event, based on quantum mechanics we can only derive a probability-based assumption on the exact time that the decay of the radioactive atom will occur. The Copenhagen interpretation says that until an observer opens the box, the entire system is in superposition and the cat is both dead and alive. In this paper, I will show that we can extrapolate this superposition of the wave function to entropy level, to the fabric of space – time, to the information paradox of black holes, new dimensions and to the multiverse theory.
Schrodinger’s cat describes a paradox in which a cat is located in a sealed black box with a poison sealed capsule inside it. Radioactive source decays and emits radiation, which activates a Geiger counter, The Geiger counter generates a signal to release poison from the capsule and kill the cat. Since the decay of a radioactive source is a random sub atomic event, based on quantum mechanics we can only derive a probability-based assumption on the exact time that the decay of the radioactive atom will occur. The Copenhagen interpretation says that until an observer opens the box, the entire system is in superposition and the cat is both dead and alive. In this paper, I will show that we can extrapolate this superposition paradox also to the time domain and the entropy level of the system.
Abstract In his 1935 Gedankenexperiment, Erwin Schrödinger imagined a box with a cat and a poisonous substance which has a 50% probability of being released, based on the decay of a radioactive atom. As such, the life of the cat and the state of the poison become entangled, and the fate of the cat is determined upon opening the box. We present an experimental technique that keeps the cat alive on any account. This method relies on the time-resolved Hong–Ou–Mandel effect: two long, identical photons impinging on a beam splitter always bunch in either of the outputs. Interpreting the first photon detection as the state of the poison, the second photon is identified as the state of the cat. Even after the collapse of the first photon’s state, we show their fates are intertwined through quantum interference. We demonstrate this by a sudden phase change between the inputs, administered conditionally on the outcome of the first detection, which steers the second photon to a pre-defined output and ensures that the cat is always observed alive.
Schrödinger's Cat has acquired many descriptions and interpretations since its introduction in 1935. This paper returns to Schrödinger's original text and separates what Schrödinger explicitly constructed from what is inferred from the construction. Schrödinger specified a steel chamber, “a tiny amount” of radioactive substance, a Geiger counter, relay, hammer, poison, a one-hour interval, equal possibilities that one atom decays or none does, and “the first atomic decay” as the decisive occurrence. He then described the wave function of the entire system as containing the living and dead cat “mixed or smeared in equal parts.” However, not knowing which of two mutually exclusive states is true, or being unable to rule out either, does not imply that both are physically true. The distinction involves not only Schrödinger's Cat but also Schrödinger's YOU—the observer outside the steel chamber who lacks information. Moreover, the causal chain from atomic decay to the cat's death contains additional physical and biological conditions. The original construction should therefore distinguish the physical cat, its quantum-mechanical description, and the information available to YOU.
The most famous cat in modern physics must be the Schrodinger’s cat, in which he hypothesized that his cat cannot be determined alive or dead until we look into his box, by which the paradox of his half-live cat had been puzzling the quantum physicists over three quarter of a century since Schrödinger disclosed it in a Copenhagen forum in 1935. Since the disclosure, the paradox has been debated by Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger, and many other renowned physicists, until now. We have found the cause of the paradox, and we will show in this chapter of which the hypothesis of Schrodinger’s cat is not a paradox after all. It was the timeless radioactive particle he introduced into the box, since timeless and temporal spaces are mutually exclusive. We will show that the whole quantum world is timeless (i.e., t = 0), since quantum mechanics can be regarded as mathematics.
Schrödinger's Cat is commonly summarized as a cat that is “both alive and dead until observed.” This paper compares that familiar formulation with Schrödinger's original 1935 construction. The original passage contains a radioactive substance, the possibility that one atom decays or none does, the first atomic decay, a Geiger counter, relay, hammer, poison, and a cat inside a steel chamber. Schrödinger then states that the Psi-function of the entire system contains the living and dead cat “mixed or smeared in equal parts,” followed by a warning against naively accepting a “blurred model” as an image of reality. Several ideas commonly associated with the Cat therefore need to be distinguished: the physical state of the cat, the mathematical description of the system, the probabilities assigned to alternatives, and the information available to an outside observer. The popular Cat is a useful shorthand, but it is not identical to Schrödinger's original Cat.