SKIRMISHER

Of the ten animals Crave has listed as the geekiest, nothing confounds me more than Schrodinger’s hypothetical cat. Sure, Pavlov’s dogs were a dominatrix’s wet dream, and Alex the Parrot may lighten you up on gray days, but Schrodinger’s feline “kicks ass” for the simple reason of it being used to explain something as weird as quantum physics.

As Crave tries to explain it down to earthlings:

As we understand it, if a cat was put in a box with a poison that could be released at a completely random time by the decay of a radioactive isotope, the cat could be either alive or dead at the same time from the point of view of anyone outside the box. This describes quantum superposition and decoherance. The most qualified physics expert we could reach at the time of writing described it to us as something along the lines of: “If a tree were to fall in the woods and no one was there to hear it, would it make a noise?“

via SLASHDOT

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