Working from the German original of Schrödinger’s well known thought experiment (here given in translation), this paper sets out several ideas that are known and determinate in Schrödinger’s cat. The first is the cat’s Schrödinger — that is, the cat putting Schrödinger into the steel box. The most important one is that atoms of the same isotope differ. And so on.
Working from the German original of Schrödinger’s well known thought experiment (here given in translation), this paper sets out several ideas that are known and determinate in Schrödinger’s cat. The first is the cat’s Schrödinger — that is, the cat putting Schrödinger into the steel box. The most important one is that atoms of the same isotope differ. And so on.
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.
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.
Schrödinger's original Cat places a radioactive substance, Geiger counter, relay, hammer, poison, and cat inside a closed steel chamber and leaves “this entire system” to itself for one hour. The construction is commonly treated as an isolated system. This paper examines what isolation means in the thought experiment. Physical isolation, causal connection, and information available about individual members of a system are different conditions. A comparison with human mortality illustrates the distinction. An actuary may possess individual information such as birthdays and living habits, yet has no probability information about when the first death claim will occur; it may come at any time and at any probability. For radioactive atoms, the standard description supplies no comparable individual information and treats atoms of the same isotope as identical or dismisses their differences for radioactive decay. Schrödinger's Cat therefore raises a question beyond the physical isolation of the steel box: what information about individual radioactive atoms is available to determine the first decay?
Following the spirit of the Turing Test, we propose Schrödinger’s Test using the original text of Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment as a test of logical reasoning and independent thinking in artificial intelligence. For a radioactive isotope, we introduce its Schrödinger’s Amount, the weight or quantity of its atoms equal to “a tiny amount” in the original text, and it is put in the steel box with the cat of the thought experiment. The test consists of a machine reading the text and answering several test questions. A higher level of the test is to have it write a report to see how many answers to the questions it contains. As a starting set, our questions are designed to dissect Schrödinger’s Cat part by part and step by step, a few of which are original, not yet available on the internet, unknown to current artificial intelligence programs, and can therefore serve as test questions. For example, why must the box be open? Are atoms identical? Is Schrödinger’s Cat repeatable? For each question, two answers are presented: a conventional or known answer reflecting standard interpretations in physics available on the internet, and an unconventional answer derived through facts and logic not yet available on the internet. Since Schrödinger’s Cat was introduced in 1935, with Einstein’s involvement, it has been extensively studied, taught, and wrote for nearly 100 years, Schrödinger’s Test represents an extremely high-level of human intelligence.
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!
In 1935 Erwin Schrödinger proposed a thought experiment to show the absurd consequences of applying quantum mechanics to everyday objects. Schrödinger imagined placing a cat in a box, along with a vial of deadly poison that is connected to a radioactive atom. If the atom decays, it releases the poison and kills the cat. When the box is closed we do not know if the atom has decayed or not, which means that it can be in a "superposition" of two states (decayed and non-decayed) at the same time. Therefore, protested Schrödinger, the cat can be both dead and alive at the same time – which is clearly absurd. There was obviously, he thought, some boundary between the microscopic world of atoms and quantum mechanics, and the macroscopic world of cats and classical mechanics.