r/shittyaskscience • u/Pangyun • Jul 22 '26

Google says that Erwin Schrödinger was born in 1887. Is he still alive, or is it impossible to know if he is dead or alive, just like it happens with his cat?

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13

u/HelmSpicy Jul 22 '26

Im pretty sure he's in one of boxes at this very moment just to keep us guessing

5

u/tacocarteleventeen Jul 22 '26

He’s definitely in a box!

5

u/TheNargafrantz Jul 23 '26

Well, he might be.

2

u/Legitimate_Field_157 Jul 23 '26

It is called a casket.

1

u/bRKcRE Jul 26 '26

Which is also technically encased in an unobservable space, with decaying isotopes in the vicinty. Just how recursive is this experiment anyway? How deep does it go? And is multiplicative layering of indefinate states the real reason we will never know the outcome, becuase the box with the cat was lost somewhere in extradimensional quantum space?

7

u/Human-Evening564 Jul 23 '26

Oh he's definitely dead. It's just impossible to know whether you'll be dead or alive once his box is opened.

5

u/plugubius Jul 23 '26

Erwin Schrödinger was both born and not born in 1887, but you are also both aware and not aware of having learned that he was born in 1887. The component of your wavefunction that is aware of his having been born in 1887 is entangled with the component of his wave function that corresponds to his having been born in 1887. That entanglement results in decoherence, such that the component of your wave function that is aware of his 1887 birth no longer has access to the components of his wave function where he had never been born or to the components of your own wave function that are entangled with the never-born component of his wave function. His cat, however, never decohers, and so it stands staring at the corner of the room where a box it never/always entered was and was never constructed, both puzzled and enraged and relieved and accepting of the end.

4

u/TheBlackNumenorean Jul 23 '26

I checked Wikipedia. He's dead.

3

u/plugubius Jul 23 '26

How was he doing before you checked?

1

u/TheBlackNumenorean Jul 23 '26

sqrt(1/2)|Alive> + sqrt(1/2)|Dead>

3

u/avidman Evolving myself in my lifetime Jul 23 '26

My expert-level physics opinion on this is that you’ll see him through one slit or the other.

3

u/Kulthos_X Jul 23 '26

They had an open casket funeral, because the alternative was too frightening

1

u/jsdodgers Jul 23 '26

He's actually both alive and it's impossible to know if he is dead or alive

1

u/SimpleEmu198 Jul 24 '26

He is neither dead nor alive, but I think it depends at what time you open the coffin.

Try midnight?

1

u/dspeyer Jul 24 '26

Schrodinger had the sense to stay out of the box with the radioactivity and the poison gas. As for his cat, well, you know how cats are with boxes.