Thing is that Schrödinger would never put a cat in a box to test his thought experiment because Schrödinger knows that macroscopic objects don’t really adhere to quantum mechanics principles because of decoherence.
He only proposed the cat thing to show how ridiculous it is to apply quantum mechanics to macroscopic objects. Unfortunately the sarcasm was missed and it became the standard example of quantum mechanics.
That’s not true. If you read Schrodinger’s original paper “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics” he’s pretty clear that he was attempting to show how ridiculous it is to treat a superposition of states as if a particle is actually smeared out in multiple locations at once, because you could use that particle as the basis of a chain reaction that would eventually affect a macroscopic object, and then you would have to say the macroscopic object is smeared out in multiple places at once. The argument was a reductio ad absurdum for treating microscopic objects as if they are smeared out in multiple places at once. Its fundamental point was simply not a commentary on macroscopic objects but microscopic objects.
You don’t need the wave function to do quantum mechanics, it’s just a mathematical convenience, and so Schrodinger had insisted it shouldn’t be interpreted as a literal physical object as if particles are actually spreading out as waves. In his book “Science and Humanism” he says that the reason he invented the wave formalism is because he didn’t like Heisenberg’s formalism which, even though it made all the right predictions, it didn’t give intermediate states for particles, so it is as if they just hop around from interaction to interaction probabilistically, and the wave formalism was meant to “fill in the gaps” between the interactions.
However, in that book he also says that he believes this project was a failure because all the wave formalism does is move the gap between interactions to a gap between the evolution of the quantum state and observation, which made even less sense, and so he changed his mind and argued that we should abandon the notion of filling in the gaps between interactions, and the illusion of continuous transitions between states is only a macroscopically emergent feature.
Rather, it became the standard example of every event that has 2 outcomes, regardless of quantum mechanics is even applicable or not. It was a complete failure.
He “placed” uranium in that mind box
Which was the more important point.
If the microscopic particle subject to superposition was the catalyst for the cat’s death, then too isn’t the cat’s fate in both realities?
Of course he was being intentionally absurd
Do you want collapsing wave functions? Because cats how you get collapsing wave functions.
Room temperature is another great way to get decoherence
I approve of this meme template.
It’s cute 🥰
It’s a
nicebox.Anice box, with a hot rock.
“So you say I go in the box, and then I am immortal in there, until you look in? Well just don’t look in then you asshole! Just let me be, let me rest. I will bring a screwdriver and hinges with me and close that shit from the inside!”
