Schrödinger’s Cat : An Unanswered Question in Quantum Physics

Imagine you put a cat in a box with some deadly poison in a glass (or unstable gunpowder in Albert Einstein’s version) that has 50% chance of exploding in the next minute and hence killing the cat. Until we open up the box and look into it, we don’t know whether the cat is dead or alive. However, when we do open up the box and look, it is either dead or alive — but not both.

If we repeat this experiment over and over again with different cats and boxes, we see that half the time the cat survives and the other half it is dead.

According to quantum mechanical interpretation of the experiment, at the instance before the box is opened, the cat is in superposition state— a consequence of duality of particle-and-wave nature — which essentially means it is both dead and alive at the same time. Only when the box is opened, we see a single definite state. It is in fact our active looking that forces the nature’s decision and our curiosity that kills the cat.

The more controversial part of the experiment is when we look into the problem inside out. Inside the box we have two possibilities. The poison either explodes (A) and the cat sees it exploding (B) or the poison does not explode (¬A) and the cat does not see it exploding (¬B) — events or their complements occurring but not both. There is no option where the poison explodes and the cat does not see it exploding. Hence, the cat’s reality is implicitly tied to the outcome of the experiment which means that it is our observation of the experiment which forces the nature to collapse into one outcome or another.

This is called the Schrödinger’s cat paradox devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 and it is one of the thought experiments exposed in Copenhagen interpretation. Although there have been many objections and criticism of the idea mainly stating that events occur in nature regardless of whether we are observing them or not, this paradox remains one of the biggest unanswered questions in quantum physics.

Now let’s think about the problem from our perspective. To us, there are also two possible realities; either the cat dies and we see it dead when the box is opened or it lives and we see it alive.

Following the same thought process, the following mind-blowing question arise: Is it that someone is observing us which forces the nature to collapse into one outcome or the other? Or could it be that our reality is a meta-verse and both events occur at the same time in two parallel universes but we only witness the one we are in right now … ?

Well, no one has the answer to this question yet. Schrödinger himself found quantum physics and paradoxes like this so philosophically disturbing that he abandoned the field and turned into writing about biology.

As unrealistic as it may seem, this phenomena is not only very real but is in fact the foundation of our today’s technological advancement. If it weren’t for the quantum objects to be in two states at once, the silicon semiconductor material, transistors and the chip inside the computer you’re using right now to read this blog couldn’t exist.