Have heard of the thought experiment known as “Schrödinger’s Cat.” I have, and trying to wrap my brain around it almost made my wee Cajun brain explode.
Devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, it all boils down to this:
A cat, along with a flask containing a poison and a radioactive source, is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead.
Anyway, I thought this short video from Minute Physics would help me make sense of it, but apparently I’m too stupid to grasp it. Maybe you’ll have better luck. Meanwhile, I’ll wait for Chemistry Cat to explain it all to me.