Correct. Schrodinger's Cat-In-The-Box analogy doesn't state that ANYTHING could be in the box, just that the cat simultaneously exists in a state of life and death until you ascertain which it's in. It only really works as an analogy, as it relies on the idea that you can't hear the cat, see the box shaking from its movements, or smell it rotting away. Also, unlike the above, it relies on the experimenter having put the cat in the box themselves and therefore knowing it's in there.
Schrodinger was the first personto use a cat and a piece of radium to cleverly demonstrate quantum uncertainty, not the first person to point at a closed box and say "ANYTHING could be in there! WE WON'T KNOW UNTIL IT'S OPENED!". That discovery probably befell a caveman, centuries previous.
I'm not a physicist either, but I recall Niels Bohr once said "Anyone who claims that quantum theory is clear doesn't really understand it at all".
You're not wrong. "Schrödinger's cat" is a thought experiment that is all about the paradox of observation in terms of quantum theory. It also has multiple solutions, depending on which theory of QT that you subscribe to.
The original idea was: a cat's in a steel box with a a radioactive isotope that has an atom that, if it decays will trigger a release of poison gas. So if the atom decays, the cat dies and if it doesn't, the cat lives. It's a paradox based on the concept of 'superposition'....namely that some things on the atomic level exist in multiple states until actually measured and observed, at which time they take an actual state. Schrodinger's cat takes that idea to the macro level: according to quantum theory, the cat could be both alive and dead, because the state of the atom is not determined until observed...but that runs counter to our reality, since the cat CAN'T be both alive and dead at the same time in our experience. That's why it's both a paradox and a thought experiment, because it's mostly about how to resolve these two conflicting ideas.
Now, to make it more complicated: depending on which theory of QT you subscribe to, the answer to this experiment changes. Neils Bohr, for example, believed that the simple act of measurement would determine the result...the cat would be dead or alive before any observation would take place. The 'many-worlds' theory of QT states that at that decision point, two universes spawn from one, with the cat dying in one and living in another. Another QT theory supposes that any change in the environment (temperature, gravity, air movement) would force the state to be determined...and so on.
What QT theory does NOT state from this idea is that something other what was put in the box is in the box. Now, you COULD extrapolate that the universe diverged when whoever bought the present made a choice of what to buy...but that's at a different point in time. Making that work in a story context would be harder, so I see why he went with this device here.
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No.*
*I'm not a physicist, quantum or otherwise, so maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so.
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Schrodinger was the first personto use a cat and a piece of radium to cleverly demonstrate quantum uncertainty, not the first person to point at a closed box and say "ANYTHING could be in there! WE WON'T KNOW UNTIL IT'S OPENED!". That discovery probably befell a caveman, centuries previous.
I'm not a physicist either, but I recall Niels Bohr once said "Anyone who claims that quantum theory is clear doesn't really understand it at all".
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The original idea was: a cat's in a steel box with a a radioactive isotope that has an atom that, if it decays will trigger a release of poison gas. So if the atom decays, the cat dies and if it doesn't, the cat lives. It's a paradox based on the concept of 'superposition'....namely that some things on the atomic level exist in multiple states until actually measured and observed, at which time they take an actual state. Schrodinger's cat takes that idea to the macro level: according to quantum theory, the cat could be both alive and dead, because the state of the atom is not determined until observed...but that runs counter to our reality, since the cat CAN'T be both alive and dead at the same time in our experience. That's why it's both a paradox and a thought experiment, because it's mostly about how to resolve these two conflicting ideas.
Now, to make it more complicated: depending on which theory of QT you subscribe to, the answer to this experiment changes. Neils Bohr, for example, believed that the simple act of measurement would determine the result...the cat would be dead or alive before any observation would take place. The 'many-worlds' theory of QT states that at that decision point, two universes spawn from one, with the cat dying in one and living in another. Another QT theory supposes that any change in the environment (temperature, gravity, air movement) would force the state to be determined...and so on.
What QT theory does NOT state from this idea is that something other what was put in the box is in the box. Now, you COULD extrapolate that the universe diverged when whoever bought the present made a choice of what to buy...but that's at a different point in time. Making that work in a story context would be harder, so I see why he went with this device here.