this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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I'm gonna need people to stop using it like its a literal fact that the cat is both alive and dead until observed, then.
Yeah, I hate that with a passion. It confused me for so many years, and I really don't feel like the concept is so complex, that you'd need the analogy even.
It helped my understanding a lot, to recognize that science isn't free from journalism/people just trying to find the most engaging stories, not necessarily the most relevant or well-understood stories.
An analogy like Schrödinger's Cat, which feels like it's easily understandable and which seems like an obvious contradiction, despite coming from a top scientist, that's an easy article/video to write.
And don't get me started on the entirety of science-fiction, with its universal agreement that teleportation and time travel should be a thing, even though scientific evidence is practically non-existent.
It's a superposition between both states until you observe the interaction and collapse the wave function.
At the quantum level, yeah, but there is an objective truth to whether or not the cat in a box is dead before looking. Never mind that the cat itself is an observer.
That's the beauty of the principle. How do you know you're real? How do you know know you exist?
You know simply because you're the observer. If you were stuck in a soundproof box and no one on the outside knew you were in there, effectively you don't exist. They can't observe you physically. So therefore you don't exist since you can't be observed.
Then I guess nothing is real, we're all in a box with no one to open it and look.
And that's the basis of the Schrodinger experiment. We can't know something exists without observing it. We don't know until we can see remnants of existence.