I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this and I’ve had lots of people, people that I would think are genuinely smart, get it completely wrong.

If you put a real cat in a real box and set an atomic trigger that might or might not kill it, that doesn’t make the cat both alive and dead at the same time. Stop it. You’re just making yourself look dumb.So here’s the problem. The entire idea behind Schrodinger’s cat is a thought experiment to explain to the layman how things operate at the quantum level. It’s not an actual scientific explanation of anything. Things seem to work differently at the quantum level than they do at the level that you and I actually experience. Cats are not quantum creatures. They are either living or dead. They are never both, they are never neither. To think that they do, that violates the basic logical absolutes. Something cannot be both A and not A at the same time and in the same sense. It’s an illustration of things on the quantum level which do not seem to function the same, so we think, as what we typically observe.

Yet I can’t tell you how many times I hear people say that cats really aren’t alive or dead until we verify their state. That is nonsense. We may not know the state of the cat, in the box, at the immediate moment, that doesn’t mean the cat doesn’t have a state. We’re just unaware of it. To the potential observer, the state is indeterminate because the observer hasn’t determined it. That doesn’t make it inherently indeterminable. Whatever has happened in that box has happened whether we know what it is or not.

I think the problem here is that most people don’t understand things on the quantum scale. In order for any of us to know the state of any object, we have to ultimately bounce something off of it. It would be light rays for most things in our experience and those don’t significantly alter the position of the object when we perceive them. We’re also not terribly precise so we don’t recognize if light might shift a few elemental particles an insignificant amount.

However, on the ultra small scale, that’s not the case. We can never know the precise location of anything because, in verifying its location, we inherently move the particle. If we bounce something off of it, we move it and therefore, where we thought it might have once been, it’s no longer there. This has led some scientists to think that the quantum realm is one of superposition, where a particle might be at many different locations at the same time and only collapse to a single true state once it is observed. This is not necessarily the case.

Back in the 1930s when a lot of quantum theory was being worked out, you found a lot of scientists straying beyond science and into philosophy and started to claim that it required a conscious observer for quantum particles to collapse into a determinate state. Schrodinger’s example suggested that, in the absence of a conscious observer, the cat remained in an indeterminate state where it was both alive and dead at the same time. This is simply false. Even Einstein thought that the whole “conscious observer” bit was utter nonsense and congratulated Schrodinger on his masterful example.

Since the 1930s, we’ve come to understand that conscious observers are not remotely required for waveform collapse. Reality is quite clear on the matter. In the experiment described by Schrodinger, the particle would either decay or not, the Geiger counter would either trigger or not, the poison would either be broken or not and the cat would either be dead or not. It isn’t an indeterminate state except to the observer who hasn’t opened the box. The situation within has already been determined, whether anyone ever looks inside or not. Or, of course, if the cat starves to death because nobody looked and then the conclusion is certain. It’s a dead cat.

Can we please be done with this nonsensical argument? It’s doing more harm than good at this point. Schrodinger’s cat is never, at any instant in time, both alive and dead at the same time. Anyone who thinks that’s the case is just embarrassing themselves.

Knock it off.