What is truly there if we haven't seen it with our own eyes? Does a falling tree make a sound when no one is around? In questions stemming from what we believe is true and what is really there is presented in the interesting case of Schrodinger's cat. For those who have not taken physics, the experiment places a cat in a sealed chamber with radioactive material and a Geiger counter triggered poison. Basically the experiment works as follows: If the material decays, it will cause the counter to break the bottle of poison causing the cat to die. If the material does not decay, the cat will live. Simple enough, we can open the box to see if the cat is alive or dead. However, does this mean that the cat is in that resulted state before we open the box? According to the quantum mechanics of superposition(for which is much more complex to explain), the cat is simultaneously dead and alive before the observation is done. This is known as the observer's paradox: "the observation itself affects an outcome, so that the outcome as such does not exist unless the measurement is made." So if we were to look at the box, does our actions affect whether or not the cat survives? Although the case presented is strange, it relates in that the there may be much more than "what meets the eye". I greatly enjoyed this new approach because it shows mechanisms of which can allude the human mind, and, ultimately be of things we could never be aware of. To me, it explains that we are limited in our senses and that we can only wonder what is occurring before we open that box. Is this a too outrageous to be considered a truth? Let me know what you think!
