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 Originally Posted by Poopadoop
I thought the question revolved around whether the cat was still in the box or not during the time you couldn't observe it.
No. The cat is in a box with a lethal dose of some poison. The container of poison will be broken if a radioactive sample has decayed, triggering the release, killing the cat.
The thought experiment is that once the box is sealed, and no further observations are made, the quantum mechanical description of the radioactive sample is that it exists in a state of both having decayed and not having decayed. But this means that the cat is in a superposition of being alive and dead, which seems absurd.
This was meant to show that superpositions of states is absurd, and that the American description of QM was superior to the European description.
It fails on many levels, and the fundamental premise was flat out wrong.
A) both interpretations of QM are identical, but present themselves against a backdrop of different-looking mathematical frameworks. All predictions made by one group are predicted by the other group, there is nothing one predicts that the other does not. They are the same, though they are presented differently.
B) The superposition of states, absurd though it sounds, is easy to experimentally verify, and is done by undergraduate physicists all over the world.
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