That paradox famously came to be known as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and forced physicists to come to the impossible conclusion that the subatomic world was brought into existence by observation. The act of observing something created the very thing that was being observed—which, until then, had existed only as a set of probabilities called a wave function. Theoretically, Schrödinger’s cat was a massive wave function—both alive and dead—until the box was opened, at which point its wave function collapsed into one outcome or the other. That was happening to all matter all the time,
...more
