What Did Schrodinger’s Cat Experiment Prove
Category: Physics Published: July 30, 2013
“Schrodinger’s Cat” was not a real experiment and therefore did not scientifically prove anything. Schrodinger’s Cat is not even part of any scientific theory. Schrodinger’s Cat was simply a teaching tool that Schrodinger used to illustrate how some people were misinterpreting quantum theory. Schrodinger constructed his imaginary experiment with the cat to demonstrate that simple misinterpretations of quantum theory can lead to absurd results which do not match the real world. Unfortunately, many popularizers of science in our day have embraced the absurdity of Schrodinger’s Cat and claim that this is how the world really works.
In quantum theory, quantum particles can exist in a superposition of states at the same time and collapse down to a single state upon interaction with other particles. Some scientists at the time that quantum theory was being developed drifted from science into the realm of philosophy, and stated that quantum particles only collapse to a single state when viewed by a conscious observer. Schrodinger found this concept absurd and devised his thought experiment to make plain the absurd yet logical outcome of such claims.
Is The Cat Dead Or Alive In The Box
Schrödingers cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead.
Why Is It Important
The thought experiment gets to the philosophical heart of quantum mechanics. In one easy-to-understand scenario, the potential issues with the Copenhagen interpretation are laid bare and proponents of the explanation are left with some explaining to do. One of the reasons its endured in popular culture is undoubtedly that it vividly shows the difference between how quantum mechanics describes the state of quantum particles, and the way you describe macroscopic objects.
However, it also tackles the notion of what you mean by measurement in quantum mechanics. This is an important concept, because the process of wave function collapse depends fundamentally on whether something has been observed.
Do people need to physically observethe outcome of a quantum event , or does it simply need to interact with something macroscopic? In other words, is the cat a measuring device in this scenario is that how the paradox is resolved?
There isnt really an answer to these questions thats widely-accepted. The paradox perfectly captures what it is about quantum mechanics that is hard to stomach for humans accustomed to experiencing the macroscopic world, and indeed, whose brains ultimately evolved to understand the world in which you live and not the world of subatomic particles.
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Schrdinger’s Cat In Popular Culture
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Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment, usually described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, applied to everyday objects. The thought experiment presents a cat that might be alive or dead, depending on an earlier random event. In the course of developing this experiment, he coined the term Verschränkung .
Warning: Dont Attempt This Experiment
Schrödingers cat experiment is what we call a thought experiment.
In other words, we dont actually conduct the experiment. We use only our imagination and reasoning instead.
In fact, as we will later learn, it is truly impossible to physically conduct Schrödingers cat experiment, even if we wanted to.
That being said, please under no circumstances attempt to conduct this experiment.
This article is purely to educate one on the purpose of the experiment, not to perform it.
Among Schrödingers prolific, Nobel-Prize-winning career was his infamous cat experiment.
In fact, this benchmark experiment has been the subject of jokes, shirts, TV show episodes, and more.
However, Schrödingers cat experiment has been both misinterpreted and misunderstood over time.
Hence, this articles simple approach helps us fully understand where brilliant Erwin was coming from.
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Interpretations Of Schrodinger’s Cat
Stephen Hawking is famously quoted as saying “When I hear about Schrodinger’s cat, I reach for my gun.” This represents the thoughts of many physicists, because there are several aspects about the thought experiment that bring up issues. The biggest problem with the analogy is that quantum physics typically only operates on the microscopic scale of atoms and subatomic particles, not on the macroscopic scale of cats and poison vials.
The Copenhagen interpretation states that the act of measuring something causes the quantum wave function to collapse. In this analogy, really, the act of measurement takes place by the Geiger counter. There are scores of interactions along the chain of eventsit is impossible to isolate the cat or the separate portions of the system so that it is truly quantum mechanical in nature.
Whether or not the scientist opens the box is irrelevant, the cat is either alive or dead, not a superposition of the two states.
Still, in some strict views of the Copenhagen interpretation, it is actually an observation by a conscious entity which is required. This strict form of the interpretation is generally the minority view among physicists today, although there remains some intriguing argument that the collapse of the quantum wavefunctions may be linked to consciousness.
Why Schrdinger Put His Cat In The Box And Why It May Never Get Out
Long before cats conquered the internet, two of the greatest physicists of our time Erwin Schrödinger and Albert Einstein devised what almost seems like an evil thought experiment.
It goes something like this: You have a cat in a completely sealed box impervious to any observation from outside. Inside is a kind of device involving a Geiger counter, poison, and radioactive material whose atoms may or may not enter a state of decay in equal probability over the course of an hour. If one atom does decay, the Geiger counter detects the radiation and triggers a hammer that breaks open the vial of poison, killing the cat. If no atom decays, then the cat lives.
Of course, the device was only theoretical. Schrödinger developed the scenario in a discussion with Einstein in response to misinterpretations of quantum mechanics at the time. It was a way to describe how a concept that seemed to apply to minute electrons in atoms might apply to a complex object in the macroscopic world in this case, a cat.
is like a modern version of Newtons law, says Chen Wang, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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Schrdingers Cat Explained: Conclusion
Ok, weve just explained a lot.
But, to sum up, lets break it down into three easy bullet points:
- After one hour in the experimental box, Schrödingers cat stands at a 50% chance of being dead and a 50% chance of being alive.
- But, while the cat is in the box, it is both dead AND alive simultaneously . You dont know what you cant observe.
- Schrödingers cat experiment was hypothetically used to show Schrödingers disagreed with the Copenhagen Interpretation for larger objects, like a cat.
Animals Other Than Cats
Fiction writers have confined other animals besides cats in such contraptions. Dan Simmons’s novel Endymion begins with hero Raul Endymion sentenced to death by imprisonment in a “Schrödinger box”.
Ksuke Fujishima‘s manga series Ah! My Goddess featured a play on Schrödinger’s Cat. During one storyline, a storage room was expanded to infinite proportions and the main characters encountered a Schrödinger’s Whale, an extremely rare species with the ability to travel through space-time in a five-dimensional quantum state. The male lead in the series, Keiichi Morisato, befriends the whale and teaches it songs by a real-life musical group The Carpenters – but their time spent together is short, for the whale must move on or risk its safety as its wave function collapses. Because of this need to keep moving through quantum states, Schrödinger’s Whales hardly ever meet, the reason they are so thin on the ground but miraculously, Keiichi secured the future of the species by teaching it the songs. After discovering the whale had gone, he found out that it had learned Only Yesterday by itself – this gave the whales a call that they could locate each other by.
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Cats Present And Future
Even if Schrödinger himself didnt believe the cat theory was possible, modern researchers are trying to put some of these theories into practice. In 2016, Wang and his colleagues managed to demonstrate that its possible to entangle multiple particles. They managed to measure the entanglement of up to 80 photons, or light particles, placed in special boxes connected by a supercurrent that flows without voltage. In basic terms, it meant the spin they put on photons in one box could be observed in the other box even though they hadnt spun the latter. Photons without spin also existed in both boxes. Metaphorically, its like a live cat and a dead cat were found in two different boxes that were correlated.
Quantum mechanics is already leading to practical applications. Quantum computing is one method, in which the harnessing of superposition and entanglement allows faster calculations than classical computers. Strauch says there are many potential applications of this, but researchers are already on the cusp of using them to calculate chemical formulas in a virtual space to design drugs.
But it may still take a long time before researchers figure out a way to run Schrödinger’s experiment. If they ever do, and even the man himself thought this was unlikely, then it could show how the microscopic quantum world might affect the macroscopic world.
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Quantum Mechanics And A Cat
Why did Schrödinger develop this thought construct in the first place? In 1935, he critiqued the way quantum mechanics scientists were explaining the state of an object. From the so-called Copenhagen interpretation, an object is able to exist in all possible configurations within a specific period. However, if we extrapolate that system to observation, all other options collapse, and we can see only one possible state of an object.
How did Schrödinger approach this problem? Well, he told people to imagine an experiment that involves: a cat, a bottle of poison, radioactive material, the Geiger counter, and a hammer all inside one box. The way he set up the rules is essential to understand the paradox that comes out of the possible results. The amount of radioactive material inside the box is so small that there is only a 50% chance that the Geiger counter would detect it in 60 minutes. If radiation was recognized, the hammer would fall and smash the bottle of poison, thus killing the cat.
Schrödinger claimed that, until we open the box and see what actually happened, the cat is both dead and alive. When an object takes that form, it is called a superposition. Of course, this was enough to point out the paradox that occurs in Copenhagen’s explanation. The paradox is contained in the fact that the cat cannot be both alive and dead at the same time, and Schrödinger applied the whole critique to how quantum mechanics scientists offered their explanation.
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Schrdingers Cat Explained In A Simple Way
The theory of Schrödingers cat is quite interesting. It involves a cat that is placed in a box with radioactive materials. Later, when the box is opened again, the cat will either be alive, or it will be dead. Two options are available in this situation. Either the radioactive materials have not caused the cat to die, or they have done exactly that, and the cat is now dead.
However, until the box is opened, nobody knows for sure if the cat is still alive or has died. This is where there are two options. It is also where Schrödingers theory says that the differences in the two outcomes create a splitting of the universe into two copies, in which in one universe, the cat is alive, and in the other universe, the cat is not alive, but quite dead.
The Role Of The Observer In Quantum Mechanics
The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, which was the prevailing theory at the time, proposed that atoms or photons exist in multiple states that correspond with different possible outcomes and the possibilites , called superpositions, do not commit to a definite state until they are observed.
Schrödinger’s thought experiment was designed to show what the Copenhagen interpretation would look like if the mathematical terminology used to explain superposition in the microscopic world was replaced by macroscopic terms the average person could visualize and understand. In the experiment, the observer cannot know whether or not an atom of the substance has decayed, and consequently, does not know whether the vial has broken and the cat has been killed.
According to quantum law under the Copenhagen interpretation, the cat will be both dead and alive until someone looks in the box. In quantum mechanics lingo, the cat’s ability to be both alive and dead until it is observed is referred to as quantum indeterminacy or the observer’s paradox. The logic behind the observer’s paradox is the proven ability of observation to influence outcomes.
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Scientists Prove Schrodinger’s Cat Can Be In Two Places At Once
A team of physicists from Yale University has divided Schrödinger’s cat into two separate boxes and the darned thing survived.
Well, it did and it didn’t, simultaneously, until someone observed it. Then it either lived or it died.
Welcome to quantum physics, where the rules of the visible world don’t apply, and microscopic particles seem to operate on a level all their own.
The new research out of Yale University, published in the journal Science on May 27, builds on the principle of superposition, long symbolized by the cat in a 1935 thought experiment by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger. One of the better-known head-scratchers in quantum theory, the principle basically says that subatomic particles are in all possible physical states simultaneously a state of superposition until someone tries to observe them. They only occupy a single, measurable state when someone tries to observe them.
So, for instance, an electron theoretically occupies every possible location in its orbital until you try to find it. Then it’s in just one spot.
A Cat Without a State
The cat was Schrödinger’s farcical representation of what superposition would look like outside the lab. In his famous hypothetical experiment, he sealed a cat in a box containing a radioactive particle and a vial of poison gas. If the particle decayed, the vial would break and the cat would die if it didn’t, the cat would live.
Two States, Two Locations
A Quantum Future
Schrdingers Cat Explained: The Results
Basically, nothing about the matter is certain until we observe it.
In fact, this thought process is known as the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics.
In other words, simply looking at matter actually changes the outcome of what happens to it.
Weird, huh?
Indeed, that is why we proclaimed previously in this article that one could not physically conduct this experiment, even if they so desired.
You see, the primary focus of the experiment is that prior to observation, the cat is both dead and alive simultaneously.
Therefore, visually observing or monitoring the cat during its hour-in-the-box time would alter and prevent an outcome.
Trippy to think about, isnt it?
Realistically, yes, the matter could be at any place.
But, the probability of the matter being at some places is much higher than in others.
For instance, a carbon atom in your diamond ring could be on the Moon right now.
However, its much more likely that the carbon atom is on your finger.
You cant know where something is unless you see it.
Until you see it, the Copenhagen Interpretation says that the atom is there and is not there.
Until you see the particle, you have no idea if its there or not.
This makes sense in quantum physics, but not in real-world physics.
Actually, this very style of thinking was the purpose of Schrödingers cat.
You see, while Schrödinger found such possibilities true for single particles, they would not be possible on larger objects, like cats.
What a character.
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Understanding Why Nobody Knows If The Cat Is Alive Or Dead
The basis of this theory is that everything that is possibly possible must happen, and that whatever state something might exist in, must exist in at least one of the multitude of universes. After all of the decisions that have been made consciously by all the individuals ever alive over the millennia, all of the possible outcomes that might have happened, there must be trillions of these universes, and more are always being created.
Because of this, we dont know which universe we are in at any given time, and what that means for the outcomes of options we are presented with. We do not know what state the cat will be in, dead or alive, until we open the box. We can always assume we know the outcomes and results of the decisions we make but we can never really know for sure. And with this theory, each outcome that is possible with each decision we may make must happen in its own universe!