The illustrious physicist Richard Feynman famously noted,

if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics.

And, awesomely, that statement is as apparently self-contradictory as is quantum mechanics itself.

I make no pretense that we're going to clear up everything today,

but at least we may scrape a little bit off the surface.

Schrödinger's cat and the bomb detector is up next on Skeptoid.

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Schrödinger's cat and the bomb detector. We've all heard of Irwin Schrödinger's famous

thought experiment of the cat in the box, who, when we open the box, turns out to be either

alive or dead. Some of us understand the experiment's relevance to quantum mechanics to some degree

or another, and many of us don't know much about it other than there's a cat in a box who might be dead.

Today we're going to dispel the vagary and illuminate how the famous cat illustrates one of the

most counterintuitive manifestations of all of quantum mechanics, the ability to be in two places

or two states at once. This ability is called superposition. The way that Schrödinger's cat is

...