How to understand Schordinger's cat?

By Guangyao Q

Schordinger's cat is a thought experiment, which was devised by Austrian physics, Erwin Schordinger in 1935. A cat imagined as being enclosed in a box with a radioactive source and a poison that will be released when the source unpredictably emits radiation, the cat being considered to be simultaneously both dead and alive until the box is opened and the cat observed.

Unpredictability

Why do people not throw a coin to control the experiment's random, which determine the release of the poison? When the coin is threw, there are many factor can influence the results. For instance, the angle of throwing, the hardness of throwing, resistance of air, the microstructure of the coin, etc. After the datas are collected and calculated, the result can be knew at the moment that the coin was threw. In other word, it is not unpredictable.

The core of the experiment is the machine, which controls the unpredictability. The principle is using the characteristic of radiation's half-life-period that is unmeasurable, and unpredictable. Before people open the box, they did not know whether cat was alive or dead.

Alive or dead

Schordinger's cat

Before people looked at the picture, they are white(alive) and black(dead). People only could look at one kind of color once. People knew white and black were there, but they did not know the exact places of white and black. This was similar to the statement of Schordinger's cat, which was alive or dead at the same moment.


When people observed the cat, there were two statements:
1. Only look at white(alive).
2. Only look at black(dead).

So, it means the cat was alive and dead before people observed the inside of the box. When people really wanted a result and observed the car, the cat could only have one statement, which is alive or dead.

It is also the basic idea of superposed statement for quantum theory, which is important.

Thanks for reading.

Reference:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger%27s_cat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger%27s_cat