What Is a Paradox?
10. Schrodinger’s Cat Paradox
Put a cat in a closed box with a device and a vial of poison. The device has a 50/50 chance of releasing the poison, killing the cat while still in the box. Without opening the box, you cannot tell whether or not the cat is dead or alive. Therefore, it must be both dead and alive.
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This paradox, coined by Erwin Schrodinger, is one of the most famous of all paradoxes, and one of the most misunderstood. The reason it is misunderstood is that it is not a paradox at all. The cat is not dead and alive simultaneously, that would be ridiculous, but that’s the point. Schrodinger invented this thought exercise to show how ridiculous it is to try and apply the rules of quantum mechanics to the non-quantum world.
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