The Famous Schrodinger’s Cat Thought Experiment Gets Brought to Life in an Off-Kilter Animation

Schrödinger’s Cat is one of the more famous thought exper­i­ments in mod­ern physics, cre­at­ed by Aus­tri­an physi­cist Erwin Schrödinger back in 1935.  The Tele­graph sum­ma­rizes the gist of the exper­i­ment as fol­lows:

In the hypo­thet­i­cal exper­i­ment … a cat is placed in a sealed box along with a radioac­tive sam­ple, a Geiger counter and a bot­tle of poi­son.

If the Geiger counter detects that the radioac­tive mate­r­i­al has decayed, it will trig­ger the smash­ing of the bot­tle of poi­son and the cat will be killed.

The exper­i­ment was designed to illus­trate the flaws of the ‘Copen­hagen inter­pre­ta­tion’ of quan­tum mechan­ics, which states that a par­ti­cle exists in all states at once until observed.

If the Copen­hagen inter­pre­ta­tion sug­gests the radioac­tive mate­r­i­al can have simul­ta­ne­ous­ly decayed and not decayed in the sealed envi­ron­ment, then it fol­lows the cat too is both alive and dead until the box is opened.

The Uni­ver­si­ty of Not­ting­ham’s Six­ty Sym­bols YouTube chan­nel pro­vides a more com­plete expla­na­tion. But with or with­out any fur­ther intro­duc­tion, you can watch the off-kil­ter ani­ma­tion, above, which imag­ines the ori­gins of the orig­i­nal exper­i­ment. It was cre­at­ed by Chav­dar Yor­danov for an ani­ma­tion show in Lon­don.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

80 Free Online Physics Cours­es

Nick Cave Nar­rates an Ani­mat­ed Film about the Cat Piano, the Twist­ed 18th Cen­tu­ry Musi­cal Instru­ment Designed to Treat Men­tal Ill­ness

Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to Quan­tum Mechan­ics: From Schrödinger’s Cat to Heisenberg’s Uncer­tain­ty Prin­ci­ple

Ani­ma­tions of 6 Famous Thought Exper­i­ments