Once upon a time having a trip between two Ukrainian cities and being in the middle of nowhere, I and my friend where having a talk about Erwin Schrodinger and his weird experiment - Schrodinger's Cat. That was the first time I've heard about this and it just don't go out of my head.
The experiment itself is well described in BBC article and Wikipedia. The core is simple. A cat is being put into black box with no connections to outer world. There is a poison and a mechanism inside of it, that releases the poison depending on a state of a radioactive isotope. In that case cat dies. Now it goes to tasty part - a superposition. Basically it is a combination of all possible positions. Isotope has two possible positions - decayed and not decayed. It's superposition is both. So the superposition for the cat is dead and alive at the same time. As long as observer doesn't look inside of the box, it is unknown if cat is alive or not, so according to quantum mechanics it is both dead and alive.
What is strange is not only experiment, in some sources it is called a "joke experiment" or a "brain toy". The weird thing is superposition, which says, that the world exists in different configurations (positions) at the same time. And it is not science fiction, it is a conservative science point of view.
I think some major changes in science are going on right now and that is really exciting.
I don't actually know what to do with this knowledge, but I think it is highly important data to have in our heads. Maybe it will never be used in practice, but it can make us more prepared for something unexpected and unknown, that does exist for sure.
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