The Art of Schrodinger’s Cat

Erwin Schrödinger posited a thought experiment in 1935 that became known as Schrodinger’s Cat. You put a cat in a box with some equipment and shut it up. Inside, there is a radioactive element that has a 50% chance of decaying in an hour. Any decay will register on a Geiger counter, which trips a device that breaks a poison vial and kills the cat. But the box is closed. At the end of that hour, is the cat dead or alive? You cannot know until you open the box. Therefore, until you observe the cat, he exists as both dead and alive. That doesn’t make sense to laymen, but we do our best to interpret the experiment in the most amusing ways possible. See a few of those interpretations in an article I posted at mental_floss.