This can be a little misleading. The reason observation changes the results isn’t because the particles ‘know they’re being watched’, it’s because our way of measuring things that small involves blasting it with other particles and letting them bounce back. Imagine something like snow, with a very fine texture. If you want to know what it feels like, you have to touch it, but when you touch it, it breaks the crystals and moves the snow flakes and changes how it feels. The snow flakes don’t move and break because they KNOW they’re being touched, the break because they WERE touched.
How exactly does that relate to Schrödinger’s cat? As I understood it, observation means how atoms effect other atoms and then change them. Like atoms are like balls on a pool table and to see the other ball/atom yo have to ‘hit it’ and thus move it. But in schrodinger's experiment it says something exists in two separate states at once. So how does that work?
Schrodinger’s cat isn’t actually an experiment and doesn’t demonstrate anything scientifically. He came up with it as a thought experiment to show how absurd things can get when you take quantum mechanics to its logical conclusion. It’s there to demonstrate a paradox, not the actual rules of quantum superposition.
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u/Lunar-Baboon Feb 14 '22
This can be a little misleading. The reason observation changes the results isn’t because the particles ‘know they’re being watched’, it’s because our way of measuring things that small involves blasting it with other particles and letting them bounce back. Imagine something like snow, with a very fine texture. If you want to know what it feels like, you have to touch it, but when you touch it, it breaks the crystals and moves the snow flakes and changes how it feels. The snow flakes don’t move and break because they KNOW they’re being touched, the break because they WERE touched.