What can Schrödinger's cat teach us about quantum mechanics? - Josh Samani

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Consider throwing a ball straight into the air. Can you predict the motion of the ball after it leaves your hand? Sure, that's easy. The ball will move upward until it gets to some highest point. Then it'll come back down and land in your hand again. Of course, that's what happens, and you know this because you have witnessed events like this countless times. You've been observing the physics of everyday phenomena your entire life. But suppose we explore a question about the physics of atoms, like what does the motion of an electron around the nucleus of a hydrogen atom look like? Could we answer that question based on our experience with everyday physics? Definitely not. Why? Because the physics that governs the behavior of systems at such small scales is much different than the physics of the macroscopic objects you see around you all the time. The everyday world you know and love behaves according to the laws of classical mechanics, but systems on the scale of atoms behave according to the laws of quantum mechanics. This quantum world turns out to be a very strange place. An illustration of quantum strangeness is given by a famous thought experiment, Schrödinger's cat. A physicist, who doesn't particularly like cats, puts a cat in a box, along with a bomb that has a 50% chance of blowing up after the lid is closed. Until we reopen the lid, there is no way of knowing whether the bomb exploded or not, and thus, no way of knowing if the cat is alive or dead. In quantum physics, we could say that before our observation, the cat was in a superposition state. It was neither alive nor dead, but rather in a mixture of both possibilities with a 50% chance for each. The same sort of thing happens to physical systems at quantum scales, like an electron orbiting in a hydrogen atom. the electron isn't really orbiting at all. It's sort of everywhere in space all at once, with more of a probability of being at some places than others. And it's only after we measure its position that we can pinpoint where it is at that moment, a lot like how we didn't know whether the cat was alive or dead until we opened the box. This brings us to the strange and beautiful phenomenon of quantum entanglement. Suppose that