Dead and alive at the same time

In 1935, the Austrian physic Erwin Schrödinger, who received the Nobel prize in 1933 with Paul Dirac, made a thought experiment to show one of the less instinctive consequences of quantum mechanics.

 THE EXPERIMENT

The experiment is called “Schrödinger’s cat” and sometimes is described as a paradox. It consists in an opaque closed box where there is a cat, a bottle with poisonous gas and a device with a radioactive particle which have a 50% probability of activating the device, liberating the gas and killing the cat and a 50% probability of not killing the cat within a specific time.

At this point and based on quantum mechanics, the cat is alive and dead at the same time (superposition). But, when we open the box to check the state of the cat, the cat will be dead or alive, we will have broken the superposition. 

 

 

QUANTUM SUPERPOSITION

It is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics that holds that, for example, an electron, exists in all possible states simultaneously until it is observed or measured because in that moment the result is one of the possible states. For that reason, we aren’t able to predict the result, we can only calculate the probabilities.