Schrödinger's Cat

I revisted the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiement this afternoon while telling the missus that I had finished the chocolate chips she was going to use to make cookies this afternoon . "If you don't open the kitchen cabinet and collapse the wave function, the chocolate chips are perfectly superpositioned -- meaning the chocolate chips are both there and not there (at least from her perspective). She did'nt buy it and just as she opened the cabinet, I felt the wave function collapse and my midnight snacking from last week was revealed.

Schrödinger was a nobel prize winner in Physics in the early 1930's and his thought experiment helps one understand the concept of superposition. The experiement begins with a box and a live cat. You place the cat in the box, close the lid and the cat is in one of two states alive or dead. Obviously the cat is alive, because we just observed it. Next, some harmful material (this material, if consumed is fatal to the cat) is placed into the box with the cat and the lid is closed once again. At this point let's assume we don't know if the cat has consumed the fatal material and has perished, or if it is still alive. Our rational mind would say that the cat is is either dead or alive at this point and we cannot know for sure until we remove the lid. Enter quantum theory and the concept of superposition which says that until we have opened the lid, the cat has satisfied both states or is both dead and alive in terms of possibilities. Superposition happens when we cannot observe the state of an object and there are multiple plausible explanations of its state. The moment we open the lid, superposition disolves into the magic ether and the cat is forced into a state of being either alive or dead. Life in the quantum world is chock full of these types of possibilities.