Subreddit: r/ExplainLikeImFive
User: u/cant1change1my1name
Original Post:
Why is it that Schrödinger's cat both dead and alive if the box is unopen, but can only be dead or alive when the box is opened?
My Response:
Observing doesn’t actually affect the state of the cat. It interrogates the scenario, so the data you receive gives you only one state. The act of observing forces there to be information that is either the cat is dead, or it is alive. If there is no data on the state, the cat is allowed to be both dead and alive.
The reason for this thought experiment comes from the issue that arose when people were studying electrons and light. Scientists were perplexed because they would shoot light/electrons through a slit and get a specific pattern. The pattern comes similar to something where if you dropped two stones in a pond, some of the peaks would be additive and result in a larger peak, and some of the peaks would cancel each other, resulting in no wave.
For a good visual, here is a physical two-slit experiment done in a pond (start at 4:40):
This is what is meant by “wave-like” behavior.
So light and electrons do something similar where you can see the peaks and troughs appear in a piece of paper after going through two slits:
What was puzzling was that if you slow down the electron flow to one electron at a time, you can see one electron show up at one of the peaks, and another show up at another peak, one at a time. But that single electron could only be in a single position - you can’t split an electron in half and get half the intensity at each peak. It’s a single particle.
Over time the probability of showing up at each peak results in the same interference pattern, but the single electron has to show up somewhere, which means it’s not at any other peak.
So in the same sense with Schrodinger’s cat, if you’re not interrogating the state of the cat, it’s allowed to be both dead or alive (wave-like behavior), where it acts like the statistical distribution. But once you interrogate a single electron (or in this case, open the box), it has to be somewhere. It has to have a state. The single electron can’t be in two places at once.
So your cat has to be either dead or alive. It can’t be both.
Source: My blurry memory of undergraduate quantum mechanics I took in 2011.
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