{"id":1326,"date":"2025-04-30T11:02:22","date_gmt":"2025-04-30T08:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/artemiada\/eng\/?p=1326"},"modified":"2025-11-20T19:37:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T16:37:09","slug":"schrodingers-cruel-thought-experiment-was-repeated-but-without-the-cat-and-not-mentally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/artemiada\/eng\/2025\/04\/30\/schrodingers-cruel-thought-experiment-was-repeated-but-without-the-cat-and-not-mentally\/","title":{"rendered":"Schr\u00f6dinger’s cruel thought experiment was repeated, but without the cat and not mentally"},"content":{"rendered":"

The thought experiment known as Schr\u00f6dinger’s cat is one of the most famous and misunderstood concepts in quantum mechanics. By thinking deeply about it, researchers have come to some impressive discoveries about physical reality.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

According to an article in Quanta Magazine, Austrian physicist Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger, who helped found quantum mechanics, first conceived of his cat puzzle in 1935 as a commentary on problems originally posed by luminary Albert Einstein.<\/p>\n

As they developed their new understanding of the subatomic realm, most of Einstein and Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s colleagues realized that quantum entities exhibited extremely strange behavior. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr championed the idea that particles like electrons had no well-defined properties until they were measured. Before that, particles existed in what was called a superposition of states, with, for example, a 50% chance of being oriented \u201cup\u201d and a 50% chance of being oriented \u201cdown.\u201d<\/p>\n

Einstein, in particular, did not like this half-hearted explanation. He wanted to know how exactly the universe knew that someone was measuring something. Schr\u00f6dinger highlighted this absurdity with his notorious conceptual cat.<\/p>\n

Suppose someone builds a strange contraption, Schr\u00f6dinger wrote in a 1935 paper called \u201cThe Current Situation in Quantum Mechanics.\u201d The apparatus consists of a box containing a sealed vial of cyanide, above which hangs a hammer attached to a Geiger counter, aimed at a small piece of weakly radioactive uranium. Inside the box is also a kitten (and remember, this is a thought experiment that has never been performed).<\/p>\n\n

The box is sealed and the experiment is left to run for a certain amount of time, perhaps an hour. During that hour, the uranium, whose particles obey the laws of quantum mechanics, has a chance of emitting radiation that will then be detected by the Geiger counter, which in turn will release the hammer and smash the test tube, killing the cat by cyanide poisoning.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nSchrodinger’s cat. fandom.com<\/em><\/p>\n

According to people like Bohr, until the box is opened and the cat’s status is “measured,” it will remain in a superposition of both alive and dead. People like Einstein and Schr\u00f6dinger rejected this possibility, which is inconsistent with everything our ordinary experience tells us\u2014that cats are either alive or dead, but not both.<\/p>\n

\u201cQuantum physics was missing a crucial ingredient: a story about how it relates to things in the world,\u201d wrote science journalist Adam Becker in his book What\u2019s Real? (Basic Books, 2018). \u201cHow do the phenomenal numbers of atoms governed by quantum physics give rise to the world we see around us?\u201d<\/p>\n

Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s cat got to the heart of what\u2019s odd about Bohr\u2019s interpretation of reality: the lack of a clear boundary between the quantum and everyday realms. While most people think of this as an example of particles that don\u2019t have well-defined properties until they\u2019re measured, Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s original intention was the opposite: to show that such an idea is meaningless. Yet for decades, physicists largely ignored the problem, moving on to other dilemmas.<\/p>\n\n

But since the 1970s, researchers have been able to show that quantum particles can be created in states that always match each other \u2014 so that if one shows an \u201cup\u201d orientation, the other will be \u201cdown\u201d \u2014 a phenomenon that Schr\u00f6dinger called entanglement. Such work has been used to support the new field of quantum computing, which promises to produce machines that are much faster than today\u2019s technology.<\/p>\n

In 2010, physicists also managed to create a real-life version of Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s cat, albeit in a way that didn\u2019t involve felicidide (aka kitten murder). Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, built a resonator, essentially a tiny tuning fork about the size of a pixel on a computer screen. They put it into a superposition in which it both oscillated and didn\u2019t oscillate at the same time, showing that relatively large objects can occupy strange quantum states.<\/p>\n

Superposition is a composition of functions (a complex function). The principle of superposition is a principle in physics and mathematics that describes the superposition of processes (for example, waves) and, as a consequence, the occurrence of constructive and destructive interference. The principle of superposition is an assumption according to which the resulting effect of several independent actions is the sum of the effects caused by each action separately. It is valid for systems or fields that are described by linear equations. Usually, superposition is understood as a simple observation: if one action leads to one result, and a second action to a second, then their combined action will produce both results.<\/p>\n

More recent experiments have placed groups of up to 2,000 atoms in two different places at once, further blurring the line between the microscopic and the macroscopic. In 2019, researchers at the University of Glasgow even managed to take a photograph of entangled photons using a special camera that snapped a picture every time a photon appeared with its entangled partner.<\/p>\n

Although physicists and philosophers have not yet reached a consensus on how to understand the quantum world, Schr\u00f6dinger’s ideas have opened up many fruitful avenues of research and will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The thought experiment known as Schr\u00f6dinger’s cat is one of the most famous and misunderstood concepts in quantum mechanics. By thinking deeply about it, researchers have come to some impressive discoveries about physical reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1327,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[238,40],"tags":[458,57,459],"class_list":{"0":"post-1326","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-exact-sciences","8":"category-philosophy","9":"tag-quantum-physics","10":"tag-schrodinger","11":"tag-superposition"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/artemiada\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/artemiada\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/artemiada\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/artemiada\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/artemiada\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1326"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/artemiada\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1386,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/artemiada\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1326\/revisions\/1386"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/artemiada\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/artemiada\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/artemiada\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/artemiada\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}