Did curiosity kill the cat?
of course here, i mean Schrödinger's curiosity when he opened the box to check on his kitty the first place. Could the simple act of opening the box interfere with the experiment and actually send whiskers to the giant kitty litter in the sky? Quantum mechanics says your actions are a lot louder (and in this case, deadlier) than you think they are. So the next time you get curious and want to open a box with a cat, a geiger counter and a little vial of hydrocyanic acid (jeez...where did Schrödinger come up with this?) , think about it a bit.
essentially, the very act of investigating the state of the system actually contributes to the state you view as the result finally. Its like saying the cat was either dead or alive before, (or both,
but we'll get to that in a bit) but you don't know until you open the box ,the act of which MIGHT kill the cat. So there you are, interfering in the one thing you're trying to observe, the state
of the system before you interfered, And you cant tell that until you open the box! Turns out, what is initially an undeterministic system (the dead or alive cat prior to opening the box) is turned into a deterministic one in the act of opening the box, thereby provided a stable, observable outcome. what actually takes place is a collapse of the Schrödinger wave equation
but somehow nobody thought of asking the kitty what happened while he was there all alone inside that dark box. Well, actually wigner did, and he even decided to allow his friend to open the box to evade all feelings of guilt. what wigner did differently was declare his cat "conscious" as an entity capable of observing the state of the system (which meant the cat knew when it was alive), and his friend (jeez imagine being remembered as wigner's friend all your life) was also another conscious being capable of observing the outcome of the experiment(unless he was intoxicated, but for the sake of thought experiments lets keep out the drunk guys)
by declaring a set of conscious observers, wigner asks the inevitable question "who killed the cat?" did it die when the box was opened by my friend? was it dead before? strangely enough, these exact same questions underly the principle of quantum mechanics and philosophy at the same time. Doesn't something exist only once it is Observed by another? otherwise what is an
existence? And whats to say the observer's interpretation of what he see's affects what is the reality of the unobserved object? to say for sure, the cat was dead before the box was opened is like trying to say you know the state of an object, even though no information has been received by you to conclude the same.
Randall Munroe of Xkcd adds a nice dimension to the problem:
Information is the key that binds it all together. Heisenberg was the first guy to say "i think maybe there's an electron there..." and when he was sure that he was uncertain, and even proved that he wasn't really looking at
the electron he wanted to observe he still couldn't tell you more than one aspect of its state accurately. for being so insightful, and telling the scientific world that he dint have a darn clue, he was of course, awarded the Nobel prize
DISCLAIMER: No imaginary Cats were hurt in the making of this experiment
