Schrödinger's cat paradox explaination

[ARR0624]

I understand the set up of the paradox...

I just do not understand what it is trying to explain
Any one mind trying to dumb this down?

Thanks.

 

[Crosson]

The paradox is the dead-alive state that the cat is in before the observation.

The paradox is designed to make quantum mechanics look absurd or equivalently show that quantum mechanics predicts an absurd world.

Some people interperet this as saying the world is strange, and some people interpret it as saying quantum mechanics is strange.

For the record, "Shrodinger's cat" originated as a throw-away line in one of Shrodinger's papers about the statistical interpretation of wave mechanics, and the writing is neutral enough, with the author suggesting the absurdity of the cat situation, and allowing the reader to draw his conclusions.

 

[Gib Z]

Yup, it basically is saying that QM is strange because our everyday world intuition says the cat is either dead or alive, we just don't know. QM says its both :P

 

[ZapperZ]

I understand the set up of the paradox...

I just do not understand what it is trying to explain
Any one mind trying to dumb this down?

Thanks.

Please do a search in this forum for this topic. There have been plenty.

Zz.

 

[Sojourner01]

Schrodinger's Cat is really quite a naff idea; it's been heavily overused and misquoted as something meaningful. Obviously you can't have a cat that's half alive and half dead. Talking about Schrodinger's Cat as being about anything meaningful makes about as much sense as talking about going past the egde of the universe, or asking what happened before the Big Bang.

 

[ziad1985]

This issue is being very exaggerated.
The cat can be both dead and alive at the same time , unless you can do an observation.
This is somehow close to the following statement(i don't know if i wrote it right): If a tree falls in a forest and there is nobody around ,will the crash make a sound ?
I believe the problem is when we include our human subjective into the system.Just because in our understanding mean that something is absurd , that doesn't mean that it's wrong..
The strange thing about this world and QM is us..

 

[Moridin]

There is a thing called 'probability' in quantum mechanics. One does not need to go into overdrive with philosophical questions or claiming that it is as useless as discussing what happened before Big Bang to understand that.

 

[ARR0624]

Thank you all who answered and I'm sorry zapper for not searching before I posted a new thread.