Alt code? I just use the option+u then o.
So, there's a cat in a box with a glass vial of POISON GAS, a hammer, a geiger counter, and something that decays. This whole set-up may or may not kill the cat based on atomic decay.
Now, quantum theory is pretty fucked up if you are used to nice ol' intuitive classical mechanics. You see, reality is probabilistic and non-deterministic. Wee can not know everything and really there is nothing to know until something has been observed.
The cat thing was a way of saying "HEY GUYS THIS THEORY IS FULL OF SHIT", because quantum theory says that until the particle is observed, it is in a state that is the combination of the possibilities of it having decayed and not having decayed. So, if we stick a geiger counter on top of it, and drop the hammer on the vial in the event of decay, then the cat is in a mixed state of being dead and not dead until we open the box and 'observe' it.
Now, the problem with this is that it is kind of abusing thoughts from 'normal' life into working for quantum physics and then abusing them back. The problem basically illustrates that there is this pretty weird gap between the microscopic and macroscopic interpretations of science. Conveniently, though, we pretend this is OK because it makes us feel better.
The easiest way to say that the cat is, in fact, dead or alive and not a smear of both, is to say that the geiger counter observes the decay, so you can't tie a macroscopic process to a microscopic process without some observation.
That's a little bit hand-wavy, but the course I took was an applied math course on quantum theory, not a physics course on quantum physics, so I'm a little messy on the physical interpretation business. This is how I get to sleep at night. By waving my hands around and pretending my theoretical knowledge means I understand stuff.
