Question

What is Schrodinger’s cat?

Answer 1

The Schrodinger’s cat is a type of a hypothetical situation of a cat which is used as a tool in order to explain quantum theory. Sometimes Schrodinger’s cat is described as a type of paradox.

Complete step-by-step answer: In this hypothetical situation or the imaginary experiment, the Schrodinger put an imaginary cat inside a box and the box also contained a radioactive substance, along with a hammer with a Geiger counter and a small vial which contained poison. Now, we will discuss what his theory explains would happen if we keep all of these together in the box. He explains, at first the radioactive substance which was kept in the box would come into play and start to decay, the Geiger counter which was also present in the same box would detect it, and this detection of the counter, would trigger the hammer to release the poison. At the end of this process, the spilling of poison would kill the cat. Now, this experiment describes that radioactivity is a random process and the prediction of a random process is not possible. So, the observer who is observing from the outside of the box cannot know if the cat is dead inside or still alive until the observer opens the box. We can say that the fate of this cat is tied to the chance of the decay of radioactive substances. So the Schrodinger said and we quote, the cat is “living and dead…in equal parts” until we open the box in order to observe what happened to the cat.
In other words we can say that we cannot know the state of the cat and it will remain unknown to us until we observe it by opening the box, so until we open the box, the cat inside the box is dead and alive both at the same time, this state is known as quantum superposition. This superposition is applicable on the subatomic events which are random in nature and it may or may not take place.

Note: The Schrodinger’s cat is an experiment which is imaginary in nature, which is used to describe how the state of a subatomic particle cannot be predicted until it is observed, just like the state of the cat inside the box cannot be known as dead or alive until it is observed.