The armchair physicist’s first foray into the concept of quantum mechanics was likely the very peculiar theory of Schrödinger’s Cat. It was first suggested by Austrian-Irish physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 and represents the paradox of quantum superposition – the ability of a quantum system to be in multiple states at once until it is measured.
The thought experiment asks us to imagine a cat, a flask of poison, a Geiger counter and a radioactive source in a sealed box. If the Geiger counter detects radioactivity, the flask is shattered which releases the poison – thereby killing the cat. Until the cat is observed, it is simultaneously alive and dead. Schrödinger used this thought experiment as a teaching tool to illustrate how quantum theory was being misunderstood. But can anyone truly understand quantum mechanics?
