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# Schroedingers cat

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Schroedingers cat is a [thought experiment]? that tries to illustrate the alleged absurdity of the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum mechanics.

The system is made of a box, a cat, and some quantum system that can kill the cat, for example, a radioactive nucleus that, when it emits a particle, triggers a mechanism that kills the cat. At any given moment you can open the box and see if the cat is dead or alive. But what happens while the box is closed? The emission of the alpha particle is a quantum effect, with a probability of ocuring so, before the observation, the system of the nucleus and the alpha particle it will emit is a superposition of the nucleus in the initial state, and the nucleus plus the alpha particle. Only the observation (opening the box) "collapses" the wave function in one of those two states. Is it the cat also a superposition of "dead cat" state and "live cat" state?

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Last edited August 14, 2001 8:45 pm (diff)
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