Schrodingers Cat

see Robert Anton Wilson's Schrodingers Cat Trilogy

Schrodinger's cat is a thought Experiment devised by Erwin Schrodinger that attempts to illustrate the incompleteness of the theory of Quantum Mechanics (Quantum Physics) when going from subatomic to macroscopic systems. A cat is placed in a sealed box. Attached to the box is an apparatus containing a radioactive nucleus and a canister of poison gas. When the nucleus decays, it emits a particle that triggers the apparatus, which opens the canister and kills the cat. According to quantum mechanics, the nucleus is described as a superposition (mixture) of "decayed nucleus" and "undecayed nucleus". However, when the box is opened the experimenter sees only a "decayed nucleus/dead cat" or a "undecayed nucleus/living cat." The question is: when does the system stop existing as a mixture of states and become one or the other? The purpose of the experiment is to illustrate that quantum mechanics is incomplete without some rules to describe when the wavefunction collapses and the cat becomes dead or alive instead of a mixture of both. Contrary to popular belief, Schrodinger did not intend this thought experiment to indicate that he believed that the dead-alive cat would actually exist; rather he considered the quantum mechanical theory to be incomplete and not representative of reality in this case. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%F6dinger%27s_cat


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