One of the famous examples of the weirdness of quantum mechanics is the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat.
If you put a cat inside an opaque box and make his life dependent on a random event, when does the cat die? When the random event occurs, or when you open the box?
Though common sense suggests the former, quantum mechanics – or at least the most common “Copenhagen” interpretation enunciated by Danish physicist Neils Bohr in the 1920s – says it’s the latter. Someone has to observe the result before it becomes final. Until then, paradoxically, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time.
Univ. of California, Berkeley physicists have, for the first time, showed that it’s possible to follow the metaphorical cat through the whole process, whether he lives or dies in the end.
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