Paradox Of Schrodinger’s Cat
While experiments confirmed Copenhagen interpretation in the part that quantum systems are not “collapsed” to a fixed state until observed, it suffers from another problem. In the same year, 1935, Schrodinger devised another paradoxical thought experiment showing the absurdity of the interpretation. In simple terms, assume we have a box with a cat and a jar of poison inside. Assume there is a radioactive substance nearby. There is a possibility that the substance decays and emits a particle in the first day. If the substance does decay in the first day, the emitted particle will be captured by a Geiger counter, which in turn will trigger to release the poison from the jar and the cat will be dead. If the substance didn’t decay in the first day, no poison will be released and the cat will be alive. The physicist will come to open the box the next day to see (that is to perform the observation) if the cat is dead or alive. Since the observation is not made until the next day, the whole quantum system including the Geiger counter, the whole box and the cat would be in an undetermined condition with the cat being in both dead and alive possible states. The system would not be collapsed to a fixed determined state until observation time on the next day. This of course cannot be true as no one believes the cat can be in both dead and alive states. Then how can we make sense of this?
Next, we’ll investigate more on the paradox of Schrodinger’s cat and quantum collapsing, as they are critical to the establishment of objective identity.
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