What the hell is a Shroedinger’s cat???

The perfect name for a temporary boolean variable…

Actually, it refers to possibly the most misunderstood theory in the history
of quantum physics.
It all started as a thought experiment by Shroedinger (the physicist), who
suggested the following:
Say you have a cat in a box.
The box is hooked up to poison gas source.
That in turn is controlled by a switch, which is activated if the quantum
state of an atom is 1 and not 0.

Now, because of Heisenberg, if you try to SEE what the quantum state is,
you’ll change it ! Because quantum states decay, it will change over time,
but you cannot predict WHEN it will happen – and kill the cat.

So until you look in the box – is the cat dead or alive ?

Shroedinger’s intention was to prove that a Grand Unified Theory of physics
would not explain or predict the entire universe – a cat can only be either
dead or alive, but even though you’ve simplified it to a system where a
single particle quantum state determines this – you nevertheless cannot
predict the final outcome.

Then a bunch of physicists who didn’t like this, met up in Bern and held a big
conference about Shroedinger’s cat. Is it alive ? Is it dead ?
Eventually they decided: well bugger this, we must be able to predict. So they
invented a new state. Saying that until you look the cat is BOTH alive and
dead and everything in between. This is known as the Bern convention.

This has had a huge impact on quantum physics, not the least of which was to
lead to a whole lot of otherwizse sane scientists inventing the multiverse
theory – which would be almost fine if it didn’t basically imply that with
every decision you make you create a new universe – all of us !
It’s a sort of an ultimate science-making-man-god thing, where there must now
exist a universe in which I did not click send !

Shroedinger himself callled the Bern Convention “nothing less than a cop-out”

All of which brings us to the single best outcome of the whole thing.
It gave us the only use for the html blink tag which shouldn’t be punishable
by death – observe: