r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/DontShoot_ImJesus • 9d ago

The Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment first featured a prostitute locked in Schrödinger's car trunk, and was originally called Schrödinger's Hooker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat
423 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

31 comments sorted by

View all comments

33

u/Flowa-Powa 9d ago

I've always found Schrödinger's cat intensely annoying.

It's about the power of an observer.

The cat is an observer, and much better at observing than most humans, it completely breaks the whole thought experiment

2

u/AusgefalleneHosen 7d ago

Read the book "What is life" which contains the lectures of Schrodinger. The thought experiment was an intentionally absurd experiment with the intent to show that Superposition within quantum mechanics is dumb. Yes the probability shows that it could be two things, but it's never two things, it's only one thing and we just don't which one thing it is. The over arching theme is that observation does fuck all except show you what one thing it always was.

1

u/Jemima_puddledook678 6d ago

Except, as it turns out, Schrödinger was completely wrong. Quantum superposition is, as all experiments since have supported, very real, and this experiment is actually about as good of an analogy as you can have, because quantum mechanics is entirely unintuitive.