Schrödinger's cat

Don't talk to me about cats!

This is a part of physics that I still don't get. 

If you take a look at physics sooner rather than later you will come across the Cat. This is not a real cat, it is a cat thought up by one of the greats of his day, Erwin Schrödinger.

Besides the cat he is also responsible for one of my favourite equations , now known as... Schrödinger's equation!

One of the concepts that comes out of quantum mechanics is something called Superposition. This is one of the real mind benders of physics, first time you see this you end up thinking... yeah right!

What it shows is that at the sub-atomic level nature gets well and truly weird. The princinple of superposition says that we just don't know what state an object is in. So it can actually be in all of them simultaneously, providing we don't look. Once we look, then the act of actually looking causes the object to be in a particular state. This is strange idea, so much so that many people have struggled with it, one being Schrödinger and his theoretical cat.

The cat is placed in a box and poison is also placed in there. We then drop in a radioactive substance. If a single atom decays then the poison is released and the cat dies. The problem is that we can not know the state of the cat, alive or dead, without opening the lid of the container. By opening the lid we are making a measurement which forces the cat into the state of being alive or ... dead. So until we open the lid, the cat is actually in this indeterminate alive/dead state.

Can the universe actually work this way? There is no single state unless we make an observation? But what does that mean? I still haven't got an idea. Einstein was not a fan. Yet there does appear to be some evidence for this strange idea. if you put two holes in a piece of card and fire photons at it one at a time it appears that the photon actually manages to interact with itself to cause a diffraction pattern to occur. In otherwords the photon of light appears to interact with itself. This is one I still struggle with. It just doesn't make sense and yet there it is.

I can only assume it is my ignorance on this one. Even if there is no one to look in the box the event will or will not have happened and the universe will move on. Events have been happening since the Big Bang (if that actually happened) and will do so long after we have gone on our way. Do these events happen differently because we are not here to see them? No, of course not. Or do they? May be we need some form of omnipotent observer who can see every event, or possibility of an event, anywhere in the universe and takes a quick look to help it determine its outcome?!

Trees fall in the forest and just because no one is around to hear them they still make a big noise. Or do they? And on that completely unsatisfactory note I will end this post. At some point I shall return. Problem is, unless you come back and take another look you won't know if it is the same post, or an updated post. Only by looking can you determine the outcome of this post.