Meow!

Once again, I'm working as a physics TA. This time, I'm the sole non-physics major on the crew. True physicists are an elite few.

While chilling with my physics friends, I noticed a book that I've seen before in the BYU bookstore:



I always wondered why they put a picture of a cat on a physics textbook. Then I saw the other side, and it clicked:



Aha!

It's...Schrödinger's cat. We've all heard about the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger from the short "history of chemistry" of our high school chemistry class...but, among physicists, he's well known for this "thought experiment" used to describe quantum mechanics.

In the theoretical experiment, Schrödinger puts his unfortunate feline friend in a box with a flask of a poison, a small amount of radioactive substance and a Geiger counter. The box is closed, and (in theory) sealed off from any outside interference. If one atom of this radioactive substance decays (a completely random event), it's detected by the Geiger counter and the flask of poison is smashed...killing the cat. Since such an event would be completely random, as long as the box is closed and isolated, we must assume that the cat is both alive and dead at the same time...and apparently that's an important concept in the world of quantum mechanics.

Interesting.