The cat that wouldn't die
11 comments
·April 30, 2025nyeah
For what it's worth, it doesn't work this way at all with an actual cat in an actual metal box. You get a superposition if there's no possible way to tell what has happened. You don't get a superposition just because you sort of haven't chosen to shake a box yet.
ttshaw1
Well, yeah, it's a thought experiment. But if we had some sort of ideal box then yes, the cat would actually in a superposition
nyeah
It has to be a completely ideal box. That's a very extreme condition, so it messes very badly with people's intuition. It can not be a metal box with a cat in it, for example.
"It's a thought experiment" means "we can specify a totally ideal box." It doesn't mean "a finite metal box on a table will actually behave this way."
andrewstuart
Has schrodingers cat been tested without hurting animals.
nyeah
Yes. If you do a diffraction experiment where a particle scatters off a lattice of atoms, but leaves no trace of which atom it interacted with, then you see a superposition of all the possibilities. If you do a modified experiment where the particle leaves one atom in a different state, then you see a different result, which corresponds to scattering off of just one atom, not the whole lattice.
It doesn't matter whether you actually go and check on the atom, though. What matters is whether there's something you could check on.
marshray
Yes, on graduate students at places like CERN, whose careers live or die based on the probabilistic detection of a single particle during their time "in the box".
syncsynchalt
There's nothing to test.
The elements of the experiment are each well understood and defined, but adding them together you link two incompatible ways of looking at the world. The thought experiment puts it on you to reconcile that.
bitwize
That would be pretty interesting. I dunno, maybe put an egg in there instead of the poison vial, creating a superposed system of intact egg/cracked egg instead?
chowells
But the whole point is that such a superposition is never observable. Any way of detecting it would cause it to collapse into one specified state. The only way to distinguish it from a non-quantum system is that it can be linked statistically to another quantum system. And even then, you're still only going to observe the same set of outcomes you'd see otherwise. The quantum part affects only the distribution of those outcomes.
JadeNB
> But the whole point is that such a superposition is never observable.
This makes it the perfect series of academic papers. "Practical Schrodinger's Cat, volume XIV: Still refrained from collapsing the waveform."
its so funny when you try to create an analogy to prove how something is absurd and the common understanding is that your analogy is how the world works