Comic Transcript
MARK: You were about to explain the whole point of this “Schroedinger’s Cat” thought experiment.
ALEX: Right… you see, Schroedinger believed that the act of observing an event actually had an effect on its outcome.
ALEX: So, according to Schroedinger, not only was it impossible to tell whether not the cat had died until you opened the lid, it was in fact not possible for the cat to have either lived OR died until you’d observed… because the act of observation would have affected the outcome in some way.
MARK: So essentially, you’re saying that according to Schroedinger, the cat is both alive and dead until the box is opened up, and then once the cat is observed, probability kicks in and one of the two possibilities is chosen.
ALEX: Yeah, sort of. And that’s how we’re going to get out of this continuity mess.
MARK: By killing a cat?
ALEX: No, we got into too much trouble last time.
NOTE: I should point out that in this comic, I explained Schrodinger wrong. I also misspelled his name, but that’s kind of beside the point.
Schrodinger apparently didn’t actually believe in Quantum Entanglement (the idea explained above, where observing the outcome actually affects the outcome) and his “Schrodinger’s Cat” thought experiment was actually intended to illustrate how ridiculous the idea was. Unfortunately for him, some Quantum Physicist replied with “EXACTLY! I’M GLAD YOU FINALLY UNDERSTAND” and like most people dealing with Quantum Physics, he lost the argument because down is up, and cats are made of collard greens.
