The scales of the “Schrödinger's cat” paradox

'Schrödinger's cat' is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, it was devised by the Austrian-Irish physicist Erwin Shiner in 1935, during his discussions and debates with Albert Einstein, what he tries to do is illustrate what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and what was basically debated was about the quantum state of a superposition, which is a situation in which a particle like An electron or an atom or any other particle can be in multiple states at once, rather than choosing one of those states specifically.

As the everyday world is what usually happens, people are not moving or jumping or doing various things at the same time, they are not alive and dead at the same time, however, in the subatomic world particles can do those things. , because the particles seem to exist in all these states simultaneously at the same time until an observer measures them, then it is as if they crystallize and one of the states of that particle is confirmed.

Here we come to the cat paradox that serves to illustrate this in a more graphic and simple way, the paradox is stated as follows: a cat placed in a sealed box with a radioactive substance inside and a geiger counter, that counter is linked to a hammer and that hammer could hit the poison bottle if an atom of the radioactive substance decays the counter detects it and activates the hammer that breaks the poison bottle, in which case it kills the cat.

Quantum mechanics suggests that the radioactive atom is in a superposition of states, therefore, it is decayed and not decayed at the same time and therefore following that logic, the cat would also be in a superposition of being alive and dead at the same time. time, until someone opens the box and looks at what happens inside.

This paradox, that until you open the box you cannot confirm if the cat is alive or dead, you have to assume that it is alive and dead at the same time because it depends on a subatomic particle that is in a state of superposition, you can do this paradox extend and to limits that are amazing; Imagine that we are outside that laboratory where the box with the cat is and we have a monitor connected to the laboratory that is turned off, the monitor and that the person who put the poison in the box went out of his way and put so much poison that it can kill those who open the box.

We outside the laboratory do not know what has happened, so theoretically the scientists would also be in a superposition, they would be alive and dead at the same time, something that will not be determined until we turn on the monitor to see what is happening in the laboratory.

And we can continue going up, last November 9 marked the 90th anniversary of the birth of Carl Sagan and one of his famous phrases was “we are the means for the cosmos to know itself, but to know it is to observe it and if by observing it we are determining his death”; It seems amazing, but in 2007 a very curious article was published titled “the observation of the universe has accelerated its end.”

The argument was that at the end of the 90s with the discovery of dark energy, which we still do not know what it is, but we do know what it does, it makes the universe expand and it also does so in an accelerated manner, we do not understand why. is accelerating, the discovery of dark energy suggests that the Big Bang did not produce a zero-energy vacuum, but rather another meta-stable false vacuum.

Using the analogy of “Schrödinger's cat” with a decaying radioactive atom, we can say that in this universe we are in, energy changes occur randomly, due to the findings regarding dark energy and this means that It is entirely possible that the energy state of the universe could disintegrate again, erasing everything we know from existence, because it is in this situation.

In a few words this would mean that we and everything we know would cease to exist, however, this theoretical assumption was made by Professor Lawrence Krauss and I already said that it suggests that our measurements of supernovae in 1998, which were the ones that allowed us to detect the existence of energy Darkness may have reset the false vacuum decay clock to zero, that is, they may have determined that the universe chooses a situation.

The universe according to Lawrence, before these observations, would be alive and dead at the same time, but now with The Observations the entire universe has had to decide what it has to do and it could be that it "dies", that is how curious this theory is.

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