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What if you could walk through walls or be in two places at once? It sounds like something out of science fiction, but there are some mind-bending thought experiments that have been around since the early days of philosophy and science that still can’t be solved today. Here are three of the most confounding thought experiments that have been keeping people up at night for decades now.
Schrödinger’s Cat
This is a thought experiment, first proposed by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, that attempts to disprove (or perhaps prove) quantum theory.
The basic idea is that you lock a cat in a box with some radioactive material, which has a 50/50 chance of decaying within an hour. If it does decay, it triggers a sensor that releases poison into the box and kills the cat; if it doesn’t decay within an hour, it doesn’t trigger anything and leaves both cat and radioactive material safe.
Now here’s where things get weird: Until you open up that box and see what happened (i.e., until you collapse the wave function), there is no way to know whether or not that cat is alive or dead!
The Twin Paradox
This thought experiment deals with relativity and involves two twins: one stays on Earth while one travels into space…
