Adam Becker

Well, to explain that, I need to bring in the most famous thought experiment in all of quantum physics, Schrodinger's cat.

So Schrodinger came up with this way before Hugh Everett.

He came up with his cat in the 1930s to explain why he thought there was a big problem here.

Because Schrodinger and Einstein and a couple of the other founders of quantum physics

were really bothered by this problem.

It got a special name later on, the measurement problem.

They were really, really concerned about this.

They thought there was something missing from the theory.

Schrodinger illustrated this by saying, look, maybe quantum particles are weird.

You know, maybe they can perform strange tricks.

That wave function describing where you're going to find an electron, it's sort of smeared out over all of space.

That kind of suggests that maybe the electron is in multiple places at once until you look.

So he said, imagine that you have a box, a sealed box.

And in that box, you have a very slightly radioactive lump of metal.

And you have a radiation detector pointed at it.

And you have this contraption set up so that when the detector detects radiation,

it drops a little hammer that smashes a glass vial of cyanide.

And there's a cat in there with this whole thing.

So basically, if the lump of metal emits any radiation, the cat will die.

So you put this all together, you seal the box, and you wait like 30 minutes.