Schrödinger and Heisenberg

Schrödinger’s cat

In the play David and Kyle discuss the Schrödinger’s Cat experiment. Kyle attempts to recreate it with first a frog and then a cat. The experiment was never meant to be practical. It is a hypothetical experiment designed to provoke thought and conversation. It was proposed by Schrödinger to point out the difficulties in talking about the behaviour of particles smaller than an atom.

In the experiment it was imagined that a cat was sealed in a box, in the box was a container of poison gas and some radioactive material. The decay of the radioactive material would break the container release the poison and kill the cat. Schrödinger’s point is that it is impossible to tell whether the cat is alive or dead and so both are possible at the same time. Once the box is opened only one thing is possible it is either alive or dead.

This amusing video illustrates the idea

Heisenberg

Werner Heisenberg was a theoretical physicist that proposed that sub atomic particles (those small particles that make up an atom) do not travel in a regular pattern. In trying to work out what was happening he realized as he was trying to measure the particles movement he was changing the direction of travel. So he formulated Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle which, simply put, states that it is impossible to know both the exact position and the exact velocity of an object at the same time. However, the effect is tiny and so is only noticeable on a subatomic scale.

In other words, the observer affects the observed.