The life and entangled adventures of Schrodinger's cat

TL;DR

This paper explains Schrödinger's thought experiment involving superposition, explores its logical interpretation, and discusses its development and experimental realizations, aiming to clarify quantum superposition for a general audience.

Contribution

It offers a logical perspective on Schrödinger's thought experiment and reviews its historical development and experimental implementations.

Findings

Superposition can be understood through formal logic.

Schrödinger's ideas have been realized in experiments.

Proposals exist for further exploring quantum superposition.

Abstract

In this lecture, intended for a general audience, I describe Schr\"odinger's thought experiment which was designed to show the strange results of extending the formalism of quantum theory, particularly the idea of superposition, beyond the subatomic regime. I describe a way to understand superposition in the terms of formal logic. I trace the development of Schrodinger's ideas after this thought experiment, and briefly sketch some work which realises it in actual experiments, and proposals for taking it further.