"Schrödinger's Cat?"
Lu Mingfei nodded blankly. He was not unfamiliar with the term; he had seen it in all sorts of articles and forums. But if asked to explain it, he could only scratch his head. It was probably that cat—some cat where nobody could say whether it was dead or alive.
Chen Motong looked at him like that and sighed.
"Schrödinger's Cat is a paradox in quantum mechanics," she said, with the helpless tone of someone thinking, I knew you wouldn't understand. "It was proposed by the Austrian physicist Schrödinger in 1935."
She gestured as though constructing that famous thought experiment in her mind.
"Put a cat inside a small box. There's a device inside that can release poison gas and kill the cat. That device is controlled by a radioactive atomic nucleus that may decay—over the course of a half-life, if it decays, the poison gas is released and the cat dies; if it doesn't, the gas isn't released, and the cat naturally stays alive."
"But in quantum mechanics, we can't determine whether an atomic nucleus will decay. We can only say there is a fifty percent chance that it will—that's probability."
Lu Mingfei nodded. He could still understand that much.
"But the problem is—" Chen Motong's voice took on a rather mysterious note. "In quantum mechanics, no state is definite. That atomic nucleus actually has two states: decayed and undecayed. Those two states are superposed in the form of a wave function."
She looked at Lu Mingfei.
"Following that reasoning, the cat in the box also has two states: dead and alive. They are superposed in the form of a wave function."
Lu Mingfei froze for a moment.
"—Huh?" His brows furrowed. "That sounds ridiculous. A cat is either dead or alive. How can it be both