You have a box right? And a cat inside the box right?
You do not see the cat, you see only a box.
Thus, the cat in there could be alive… or dead.
But you don’t know until you open the box do you?
Thus, the joke.
No, not quite.
It really started with the issue in physics that things can act like particles or waves (very different) at the same time. In a sense, they are both at once. These are two very different states. It’s like dribbling a ball and spinning that same ball on your finger at the same time. How is this possible?
That’s where the idea of superposition comes in. Of course, it deals with a lot more than just waves/particles, but that’s the easiest one to understand. Superposition says that both states/options exist at once. When you observe it, though, it loses that duality.
“One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of the hour, one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges, and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.
It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a “blurred model” for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.” – Schrodinger himself
Basically, there is either radioactive decay that ultimately kills the cat or nothing happens. Because of superposition on the subatomic level, this means that both states exist at once. If you follow the chain, this means that the cat is both dead and alive inside the box.
And that’s why we leave this stuff to the people who have way too much free time on their hands o;
Or get paid lots of money to work at CERN and think about this sort of stuff.
Si Senor!