Schroedinger's pilot

摘要

Readers of this column will no doubt be fully conversant with the theory of quantum mechanics (which may be related to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle - but quite frankly we're not sure!), and the famous 'Schrodinger's Cat'experiment in which a hypothetical cat is put inside a sealed box with a radioactive source and Geiger counter. If the source decays, the Geiger counter triggers the release of poisonous gas. Provided you don't open the box, you don't know if radioactive decay has actually occurred, and the cat is considered to exist in a state of being both alive and dead at the same time, and only when the box is opened and an observation performed does the system collapse into one of the two states. (The editorial board of The Log would like to point out that no cats were harmed during the writing of this article, and readers should not try this on their cat at home.)