July 17, 2024

Armita Rohani

12th Grade

Williamsville East High School

Chances are you’ve heard of Schrödinger's Cat Experiment, where Schrödinger hypothetically puts a cat in a box and proposes the idea of the Observer’s Paradox. Well, it’s much more complex than it seems, and the effects of the hypothesis have revolutionized physics to unheard extents. 

In 1935, the Austrian Physicist Erwin Schrödinger (in collaboration with Albert Einstein) designed the thought experiment to illustrate the paradox (a self-contradictory statement) of quantum superposition. He took a hypothetical cat and locked it in a box with a vial of poison, which is triggered by the decay of a radioactive material. Once the box is closed, the observer is unable to establish the state of the cat, whether it is living or whether it is dead. To make this more understandable, let’s replace the vial of poison with a bomb that had a 50% chance of detonating. There are two possible results for the cat: either the bomb detonates and kills the cat or the bomb is faulty and the cat is alive. We won’t know if the cat is alive or dead until the box is opened because we won’t know whether or not the poison was released (or the bomb detonated) until we open the box. 

Superposition plays a significant role in this thought experiment. Discovered in the 1930s by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg through the Copenhagen interpretation, superposition states that an object that adheres to quantum rules does not have a reality that can be pinned down until it is measured. In simpler terms, an object is in multiple states when the true state of the object is unknown. This idea stems from the Fundamental Theory in physics, which describes the behavior of nature at and below the scale of atoms. Before the box is opened, we say that the cat is superpositioned it is both alive and dead at the same time. The cat can only escape superposition and confirm its true, singular state once the observer, or the person conducting the experiment, opens the box. 

Through this, Schrödinger proposed quantum indeterminacy (aka the Observer’s Paradox): the observed phenomenon is unwittingly (or unintentionally) influenced by the observer’s presence.  In this instance, the observer influences the cat’s state, as it goes from an ambiguous state (both dead and alive) to a defined state (either dead or alive). 

Now we are met with the question of how this is important. The Observer’s Paradox is significant not only to the world of physics but to all fields involving experiments. It dictates that the observer’s or experimenter’s observations and measurements affect the outcome of the system; therefore, all experiments are affected by the person doing them. Schrödinger’s Observer’s Paradox and his achievement from his thought experiment have raised profound questions regarding the nature of reality and how the observer plays a role in shaping such reality.