Olaf Schlüter
2 min readDec 10, 2022

If anything, this article causes confusion.

The "Schrödingers cat" though experiment indeed was meant to mock the Copenhagen interpretation, however, the interpretation is still alive and widely used, as Schrödinger misunderstood it - the collapse of the wave function happens much earlier than anyone noticing it. The human mind and observation does not play a special role here. Any physical interaction of a quantum system in a superposed state with another will cause the collapse and will force nature to decide for one of the superposed states. No human observer needs to be present. This makes it extraordinary difficult to get anything macroscopic into a superposed state. Which is in line with our experience and observation.

Even more so, the instable nuclei causing the beta decay aren't in a superposed state to begin with, they are in an energetically exited state. So there is no superposition able to propagate into the system "cat in a box". If the amount of instable nuclei is known, the time may be calculated after which a decay must have happend with a probabilty close to 1. But the cat isolated in the box suffocates much sooner.

Everything is wrong with "Schrödingers cat". If you want to confuse students and make them miss the essence of quantum physics, "Schrödingers cat" is a good choice to do so. It may take years to recover them from the misconception that the human observer plays a role in the collapse of the wave function.

Wigners thought experiemt is logically flawed which Wigner himself admitted 1970. Alternate versions of reality are never observed and quantum physics does not give any effect leading to multiple versions of reality.

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Olaf Schlüter
Olaf Schlüter

Written by Olaf Schlüter

IT security specialist, Physicist by education, believing in God as for the exceptional harmony of the laws of nature to create and support life.

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