(Disclaimer: Just when i thought my selection of topics couldn't get any worse! That's what a girl could do to you. Apparently the only use my lady love finds of my geeky side is quenching her 'negligibly rare' doubts on mainstream scientific jargon. :) )
Schrodinger's cat! The most talked about cat after Tom i assume - of course given you have boring friends like mine. Quick recap of trivia: yes, we are talking of a cat as in the animal; something to do with being dead and alive at the same time (!!); belongs to the mysterious world of quantum mechanics - something mere mortals find amusing just because it rhymes with ehem ehem..
Lesser known trivia: It is a thought experiment proposed by an Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger in 1930s (When is the last time you have heard of a scientist named simply Jack or Tim?). A thought experiment is just a fancy way of saying 'Suppose you manage to do this utterly ridiculous thing, wonder what would happen ? '. Schrodinger put forward this 'thought' experiment to prove that quantum mechanics might confuse you if you start applying it to real life macro objects.You bet! To be a bit more specific, he wanted to show that the 'Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum mechanics' cannot be applied to big objects, say cats for example. (yes, quantum mechanics can only be applied to nano-sized objects and it has different interpretations or explanations proposed by different people). What exactly is Copenhagen's take on quantum mechanics would be too much detail, and to quote the holy grail of knowledge, wikipedia, "Despite an extensive literature which refers to, discusses, and criticizes the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, nowhere does there seem to be any concise statement which defines the full Copenhagen interpretation." Phew!
To give you a better perspective, lets zoom out a bit. We all know classical physics - the physics which we did at high school, the f=ma stuff. Unfortunately it seems that these rules just don't apply if you zoom in onto nano objects like fundamental particles. The reason simply being, at this scale, individual particles of an object tend to have a good effect on it - as opposed to bigger objects, where the behavior is an 'average' of all the particles inside. And hence quantum mechanics was proposed! To explain why particles behave they way they do at nano-scales.
Hope that's clear. Moving on, the biggest difference between classical physics and quantum mechanics is that classical physics gives you exact rules whereas quantum mechanics always talks in terms of what is 'more probable' - playing it safe, if you may. So, whereas classical physics tells you if a ball is moving or at rest, Quantum would tell you what are the different probabilities that the ball is moving at different speeds.
What Shcrodinger has done through his experiment is to transfer this element of 'probability' or 'doubt' from a micro-scale object (a subatomic radio-active particle) to a macro object (a cat). The setup for the experiment can be easily found on the internet. To summarize, a cat's life depends on if a radio-active atom has decayed. But the decay of an atom is not certain according to quantum mechanics. Hence the cat (inside a closed box) has chances of being both dead AND alive. We would never know unless we open the box (duh!). Opening the box is called 'taking a measurement' and hence when you take a measurement of the system it practically 'kills' the probabilities and the system converges to one 'reality' - dead OR alive.
NB: The low-level explanation for such a complex idea is merely to stay fair to this blog's intent. No disrespect is meant to the geniuses or the quality of their works. If the topic still boggles you with questions, i am sure you can find great detail online. And do remember, as this is a purely theoretically topic, all resources may fail to satisfy your search for something tangible.
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