Schrödinger's cat or My code?

When you hear the word ‘quantum’, what comes to mind? I think that depends upon what surroundings you live in. By surroundings, I don’t mean the physical conditions around you, rather the field in which you currently reside. For a college guy like me, whose major is physics, that word means a lot. A lot un-understood, unexplained, unexplored, and so many ‘un’s. For someone who’s layman, quantum would mean some headache of science people. Yeah it truly is, no matter the fact that all research, discoveries, theories, formulas, conclusions, observations, and other terms, affect everyone unbiasedly. Science may be just another subject, but it is not limited to that only, and as soon as people, the general ones, will realize this, the world will definitely lose a significant amount of major problems.

Speaking of problems, there is a famous not-problem hypothesis in the field of quantum mechanics, called Schrodinger’s cat hypothesis. Cats? Everywhere. What is a cat doing in this highly decorated field? Surely cats have that habit of sitting on the top of everything, and should be disturbed by none. And if you disturb them, then you may become the reason for their death. Why would they die? That’s where quantum mechanics gets in. Observation of an event might change its course. Sitting in an exam hall, the question paper of your favourite subject lying on your table, every question you read makes you more confident about the next question, and overwhelmed by this confidence, you already finished half of your exam. Everything is going so smoothly, you feel like the happiest person on the earth. And then the invigilator stands beside your bench, looking at your answer sheet as you write. No. No. Please don’t...look at my answer sheet like that - your mind says. All of a sudden your confidence vaporizes, and your pen never felt that heavy ever before.

Just because someone was looking at the work you were doing, it affected your work. Even if this example is layman in terms of quantum mechanics, it is a real world one. Similar to this, if you put a cat into a opaque box, keeping aside the detail whether it is vacuum sealed or not, can you tell if the cat is still alive? Also the cat doesn’t meow. How sure you are that the cat you just put in the box, and now is not visible to you, it is alive? Maybe it just had a heart attack, you don’t know. You aren’t sure, right? And apart from you, no one else is around.The cat doesn’t communicate in any way. In this state, it is clear that the state of cat, whether dead or alive, is unclear. So, forced by your curiosity and your love for the cat, you went to check. Unfortunately, the cat had a heart attack, and is dead now. Sad. But what’s more sad is, your friend just came and saw you with a dead cat, now thinks that you killed the cat.

The series of events above are analogous to the examination hall scenario. As you looked at the cat, it died. As the invigilator looked at your answer sheet, it died. I mean, you stopped working. That is what this hypothesis has to convey. Until and unless someone looks into the box, the chances of the cat being dead and alive are equal. It is said it is in both states at the same time. And the observer, here you, are the reason for one of the states to be true, because you observed the cat.

Strange, isn’t it? For people of non-science background or foreground, things like these are common in the field of quantum mechanics. Probability fails to predict any outcome when it is equal for all events. For the cat, events were - death and aliveness, and their probabilities were equal until it was unobserved. Both events were simultaneously occurring is a very direct conclusion. That’s why it is Schrodinger’s cat. That’s why it is a quantum mechanics’ topic.

A similar event occurred with me while I was programming, so upcoming things will be better understood if you have an idea of coding. Just have a look at the following piece of code, the language is Java, android.

If you are unable to understand what dialect is shown above, consider a value which can either be true or false. Initially we set that value to be true. Now we gave that value to someone who doesn’t know if it is true or false. But that person is allowed to change the value, and the only thing she can do is to change the previously set value by clicking a button. At no point of time she knows the actual value, but whenever she presses the button, the value becomes the opposite of the previous value. If it was true, button press makes it false, and vice versa.

If you are a programmer who understood the above code, the crux behind that is an initial boolean variable is set to true by the developer. The user is allowed to change that value the way she wants. Although a feedback checkbox will be there to tell the state, the actual value passed to the function changing the previous value is always being passed as opposite of previous value [!userWantsUpdateNotification()]. Also if we don’t consider the checkbox feedback, the passed previous value at some point of time will be anonymous to the program viewer.

Now common for both programmers and non-programmers (well I think you are also in both states of being a programmer and not being for me, as I don’t know you!), the value being set is unknown to the person changing it. Yet she knows that whatever will be the value, pressing the given button will change it. This points out the lead that the value is like the cat of Schrodinger’s hypothesis, having two states true and false, both having equal probability to be dominant. And unless the person actually checks the value, it is in both states of true and false.

Quantum state? I don’t know. But the instinct that my piece of code is more than half, or fully, I think, analogous to the cat and examination hall scenario, points out that this both-state thing is evident in my this piece of code, true aka alive or false aka dead, at the same time, same as we’re not sure of the state of my code, aka Schrodinger’s cat, unless we observe directly.