Who was Schrodinger? Erwin Schrodinger was an Austrian physicist who proposed that objects could have super positions (be in two positions at the same time).
His most famous way of explaining super positions was by the method of using his famous cat. There were conditions and rules that his cat had to follow in order for him to prove super positions existed. Obviously his cat was just a theoretical concept, however it can be performed by anybody who has access to large amounts of explosive or poisonous gas…
Okay I’ll explain the experiment now. So Schrödinger placed his ‘cat’ into a opaque, sound proof box, for simplicity. Along with the cat he placed a barrel of explosives into the box. Now this barrel had special properties, which allowed the barrel to burst at any moment in time. And at any moment in time the chance that it would burst was 50%. This part is really important.
Now obviously if the barrel exploded, the cat would have died, and if the barrel didn’t explode the cat would have lived. Just to make it clear there is no circumstance in which the barrel exploded and the cat was alive, or visa versa, where the barrel doesn’t explode and the cat was dead.
Now, to a spectator from the outside, who is not able to look through the walls of the opaque box, there are only two outcomes… The cat is dead or the cat is alive. However Erwin Schrödinger proved that before the spectator looks into the box, the cat is both dead and alive.
