Author: Paul Ratner / Source: Big Think
- Physicists revise the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment.
- The new version leads to contradictions in quantum theory.
- Scientists are stumped by the implications.
Quantum mechanics has produced its share of weird ideas, not least of which is what’s probably the world’s most famous thought experiment devised by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It described the uncertain fate of a cat trapped in a box with a deadly substance. Now the experiment got an update from two physicists, leading to conclusions that threaten to undermine the foundations of the whole field.
By replacing the cat in the box with multiple physicists doing experiments, the duo of Daniela Frauchiger and Renato Renner of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich has caused heated debates among physicists for the past two years.
Schrödinger’s original idea proposed that if you put a cat in a box, along with a possibly decaying radioactive substance which would release a killer acid, the cat could be both alive and dead until that box was opened, fixating its state. Schrödinger devised this scenario to point to inconsistencies in the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, created by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the 1920.
The interpretation states that a quantum particle can exist in all possible states until an observer forces what’s called…
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