Quantum Physics!

Right now my knowledge of quantum physics is lacking. For those of you who do read this: I apologize for my lack of knowledge on the matter. I intend to gain more knowledge about this subject as I progress.

Generally, I do not think, "I wonder what quantum physics involves!" I actually had no idea what it really was before today. This morning, while on the phone with my boyfriend, he told me to look up a YouTube video to explain Schrodinger's Cat. He had tried to explain a t-shirt he found and I did not think it was funny, nor understand it. Being a curious person, I just HAD to know so I could understand. "Curiosity killed the cat right?" Literally, this involves that saying! I had no idea where that saying came from and now I do!

For those of you who don't know Schrodinger's Experiment, I will explain it to you the best I can. If I am wrong, I will come back and make changes, but this is how I have come to understand it.

The idea begins with putting a cat in a bunker with some gunpowder that has a 50% chance of blowing up and a 50% chance of not doing anything after 1 minute. The gunpowder was actually Einstein’s idea, but Schrodinger used poisonous gas. The point is, until we look in the bunker, we do not know whether the cat is dead or alive. When we finally look in the bunker either the cat is dead or alive. If we do this experiment enough times, you'll eventually see that half of the time the cat survives and half of the time, the cat dies. This seems self-explanatory, but the next part is where it becomes tricky.

The quantum interpretation is that before we look the cat is both dead AND alive. Our act of looking forces nature’s decision. Our "curiosity kills the cat." Then there is the cat prospective that comes into play. Either the cat doesn't see the gunpowder explode and lives or sees it explode and dies. The cat’s reality becomes entangled with the experiment. "It is our observation of the experiment that forces nature to collapse into one option or the other."

"We're like the cat too, either the cat dies and we see it dead, or it lives and we see it alive. So who is observing us to force nature to collapse to one reality? Or do both possibilities happen in parallel within a larger multiverse?"

I had to quote the YouTube video for the harder stuff. I couldn't explain it any better than that! Here is a link to the website: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOYyCHGWJq4

Anyway, this caught my attention today, and my boyfriend and I have been debating it. I thought maybe it would spark the mind of others out there. I hope to write more on this later!