Why Schrodinger Cat Was Neither Dead Nor Alive
Why Schrodinger Cat Was Neither Dead Nor Alive — In this tale of the cat I keep recalling a certain place in our own lives. Before a matter whose outcome we cannot know, we often assume the outcome is already fixed. Whether the news is good or bad, our hearts run ahead before we even tear the envelope. Yet perhaps many things remain undecided and open until we face them and accept them. That may be why the thing we dreaded proves bearable once opened, and the thing we hoped for surprises us. The box is known only by opening. And the opening has always been ours to do.
Alive or dead — it must be one or the other. There is nothing between. We have all lived our whole lives knowing this. Yet a physicist once said: the cat in a closed box is neither dead nor alive until we lift the lid. How can one life hold two fates at the same time?
In 1935, Schrodinger devised this tale not because he believed it, but to mock it. The young physicists of the day claimed the microscopic world holds several states overlapping "until observed." Schrodinger meant to show how absurd that was. If it were true, then a cat tied to a microscopic fate must also have death and life overlapping — surely ridiculous. He hoped the nonsense would embarrass his colleagues. But nature answered his joke in earnest.
The device in the box works thus: if a single radioactive atom decays within an hour, poison is released and the cat dies; if not, it lives. But that atom, until observed, holds "decayed" and "not decayed" overlapping. Then the cat tied to it must also have two states overlapping. Here is the heart of it: the instant the box is opened, the overlapping possibilities settle into just one. The act of our looking hardens a blurred fate into a single sharp one. The answer was not waiting inside the box beforehand; it was decided at the moment of opening.
- The basic unit of a quantum computer uses a state where 0 and 1 overlap. The principle of a cat both dead and alive became the heart of a future machine.
- Ultra-precise quantum sensors exploit the subtlety of this overlap to read faint magnetic fields and gravitational tremors no ordinary instrument could catch.
- Encrypted communication turns the principle around: since the state changes the instant someone peeks, eavesdropping itself leaves a trace. The fact that looking changes things guards the secret.
虛는 비어 있음, 아직 채워지지 않은 자리를 뜻하니, 열리기 전까지 어느 쪽으로도 정해지지 않은 고양이의 상태와 통한다.
Meet this hanja in Cheonjamun →In this tale of the cat I keep recalling a certain place in our own lives. Before a matter whose outcome we cannot know, we often assume the outcome is already fixed. Whether the news is good or bad, our hearts run ahead before we even tear the envelope. Yet perhaps many things remain undecided and open until we face them and accept them. That may be why the thing we dreaded proves bearable once opened, and the thing we hoped for surprises us. The box is known only by opening. And the opening has always been ours to do.
