101 Uses for a Cat in a Quantum Superposition State of Being Both Alive and Dead Simultaneously
Quantum Mechanics, the physics of the very small, got its start in 1838 when Michael Faraday ran a very high voltage between two metal electrodes in a glass tube that had the air sucked out. This was the beginnings of the very first television. Faraday observed that, if you got particularly close to the apparatus, one could see an arc of light originating at the cathode electrode and disappearing into the anode electrode. His mother observed that he was sitting far to close to the apparatus, and postulated that if he didn't come back and sit on the couch that he would go blind, and that moreover his boy parts would likely become irradiated and turn green. Faraday married Sarah Barnard from church but they never managed to have children.
Faraday and all who followed applied a principle called Occam's Razor to their musings. It states, fundamentally, that if you have two theories to choose from, the simpler one is where you should put your money. Occam was in fact William of Ockham, circa 1347. He was a Franciscan Friar and as such his head was mostly a cue ball. He did, however, have a rather trendy tonsure which his stylist achieved through skillful use of Occam's Razor, Occam's Scissors and Occam's Bowl.
In 1905 Albert Einstein published his Theory of Special Relativity which stated that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. His reasoning was that in order to go fast you need to chuck something out the back even faster. Since light is the fastest thing you can chuck out the back, that is as fast as you can go. QED. Essentially, light is the fastest thing there is because light is the fastest thing there is.
Later, in 1907 he postulated the Equivalence Principle, which stated that for observers in a sealed room there was no experiment they could perform which would tell them if they were being subjected to Earth's gravity or were in fact in space, accelerating at 9.81 meters/second/second. But the seals weren't that great in 1907 so many of the researchers died. Those that didn't just looked out the window and saw that they were moving, no doubt in space. Later experiments had the windows covered up to maintain local realism, so those researchers had to ring up other researchers on the radio and ask them what was going on. In any event, the researchers said, they could determine whether or not they were in space by means of a simple thought experiment. If they thought they had arrived by rocket then they were very likely in space. The Equivalence Principle was deemed to have some holes and is now referred to as The Weak Equivalence Principle.
in 1926 German physicist Max Born postulated that you can't actually measure anything that is very small, you can only determine the probability density of any particular result when you attempt to measure it. This probability density, he maintained, was proportional to the square of the system's wave function. The ladies said that small is small, no matter how fast you wiggle it.
In 1927 Werner Karl Heisenberg maintained that you can't know both the position and the speed of something at the same time, to any arbitrary degree of accuracy. He explained his Uncertainty Principle with the simple analogy of an automobile, allegedly being driven at an excessive rate of speed through the center of the village, terrorizing both villagers and horses alike. He stated that the automobile could either have been maintaining a modest speed in the village, or it could have been travelling at an excessive velocity but doing so in some other location far away from the village. He also stated that there would be no way of determining which was correct without violating the second law of thermodynamics, and any attempt to do so would introduce the observer effect in any event, invalidating the whole experiment. The officer countered that he, being a detached observer, could see, to an arbitrary degree of accuracy, that this was all a crock. The ticket held.
In 1931 Kurt Gödel theorized that no statement of truth can ever be proven. Though the statement, or by extension, theory, may in fact be true, it will always be incomplete; it will be undecidable. While generally accepted as being true Gödel's theory has never been proven.
In 1935 Erwin Schrödinger showed his students a box which contained a cat that was simultaneously alive and dead. You didn't poke any airholes in the box said the students and it's giving off rather a manky smell. Erwin countered by pretending to cough but really saying meow behind his hand. And quantum mechanics has remained essentially unchanged for almost a hundred years. As an interesting footnote, it was Schrödinger's cat who, as a kitten, first discovered the entaglement of strings.