SCHRODINGER'S CAT EXPERIMENT

Schrodinger's Cat Experiment

Schrodinger's Cat Experiment Explained

Schrodinger's full name was "Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander". Schrodinger was born on August 12, 1887, in Vienna, Austria. He got his education at the University of Vienna. Schrodinger tried to tell how absurd and strange Quantum Physics is in terms of big things. To prove this, he does an experiment which is called the Schrodinger's Cat Experiment. 

It has been proved by many experiments of quantum physics that until quantum particles are observed, all are present in their all possible state at a time and this is called "Superposition State". And when our equipment observes them, their wave function collapses and they all choose one state from the possible state and we only see the state that results. So, therefore, we can not tell in advance what the result of the quantum experiment will be because of Quantum Particles can represent many states of any object. By using the Quantum Particle principle now we developed Quantum Computer. 

Quantum Particles

Schrodinger said that this principle should be applied in all things, such as animals, humans, football and all the big or small things we see because all these things are made up of quantum particles. But we know that this does not happen in practical life. All the things that we see are visible to us in the same state every time, not in many states.

Schrodinger did not like the quantum theory at all. And to make it prove that the theory is useless for big things, he took the support of a thought experiment. He took a closed box and took a radioactive substance with a cat, a poison-filled bottle and a hammer in it. Then he attached the hammer with a radioactive sensor in the box. In this experiment, the chance of decay of radioactive substances was 50%. The sensor would be activated as soon as the radioactive substance was decayed. After the sensor activates, the hammer attached to it breaks the poison-filled bottle and the cat inside it dies.

So this shows that until the box is closed we do not know whether the cat inside the box is alive or has died because of the chance of decay of radioactive substance was 50%. If we look at the cat as a way of quantum particles and apply the superposition principle to it, then we can assume that when the box was closed, no one was looking at the cat, then the cat was in both possible states, i.e, alive and dead.

This means the cat was inside the box having it's both possible states. And when we open that box then its wave function will collapse and the cat would choose one state from it's both possible state i.e, death or life. And we would get only one possible state. This means if we repeat this experiment, again and again, we get different answers. 

If we think generally, we know that when the box was closed the cat would be dead or alive but it was not possible that the cat was both alive and dead. So it does not matter whether we were observing the cat or not. The cat always is in one of its states. In the final, we can only say that quantum particles behave more differently than we thought.