transcript: This wouldn't be a youtube channel without
a cat video - so without further ado, we present: Schrodinger's cat. I'm sure you've heard some version of this
famous thought experiment: you put a cat in a bunker with some unstable gunpowder that
has a 50% chance of blowing up in the next minute, and 50% chance of doing nothing. [the
gunpowder is Einstein's version - Schrodinger preferred poisonous gas] So until we look
in the bunker, we don't know whether the cat is dead or alive, and when we do look, it
is either dead or alive. But if we repeat the experiment enough times with enough cats
and bunkers and gunpowder, we'll see that half the time kitty survives, and half the
time kitty goes bye-bye. The quantum mechanical interpretation is that before we look, the
cat is in a superposition - it's both dead AND alive - and our act of looking forces
nature's decision. So our curiosity kills the cat. But what about the cat's perspective? Well,
the cat either sees the gunpowder explode, or not – so inside the bunker we actually
have these two possibilities: "the powder exploded and the cat saw it explode" or "the
powder didn't explode and the cat didn't see it explode". There's no option: "the powder
exploded and the cat didn't see it explode" - so the cat's reality becomes entangled with
the outcome of the experiment! And it's our observation of the experiment that forces
nature to "collapse" to one option or the other. But we're like the cat, too – either the
cat dies and we see it dead, or the cat lives and we see it alive – so who's observing
us to force nature to "collapse" to one reality? Or do both possibilities happen in parallel
within a larger multiverse? This "collapsing to one reality" problem is
one of the biggest unanswered questions in quantum physics. So for kitty's sake, can
i has answer pleez?
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