Schr√∂dinger’s cat
So apparently TV writers share their random trivia between networks, because last night on both The Big Bang Theory on CBS, and Bones on Fox, they mentioned Schr√∂dinger’s cat.
For those of you who don’t know the back story behind the theory, here’s a quick rundown from Wikipedia:
A cat, along with a flask containing a poison, is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. The flask is shattered, releasing the poison, if a Geiger counter detects radiation. Quantum mechanics seems to suggest that after a while the cat is simultaneously alive and dead, in a quantum superposition of coexisting alive and dead states. Yet when we look in the box we expect to see the cat either alive or dead, not in a mixture of alive and dead.
Anyhow, I know that’s incredibly random, but I felt the need to share.
More entertaining to me is Hugh Everett’s ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics, which (and I’m paraphrasing), in the case of Schr√∂dinger‚Äôs cat, when the observer opens the box, the universe is split into two separate worlds, one containing an observer and a living cat, and another observing a dead cat, but due to quantum decoherence the two worlds have no interaction with each other.
I love crazy theories like this!