Schrodinger imagined a bizarre experiment 60 years ago, in which a live cat is placed in a box with a radioactive source, a Geiger counter, a hammer and a sealed glass flask containing deadly poison fumes... know the story? When a radioactive decay takes place, the counter triggers a device releasing the hammer which falls and breaks the flask. The fumes will then kill the cat. Quantum theory would predict that exactly one hour after the experiement begins, the box would contain a cat that is neither wholly alive nor wholly dead, but a mixture of the two states...
Can the cat be alive and dead at the same time?