Schrödinger's cat regard the "alive and dead" cat superposition as quite real. Intended as a critique of the Copenhagen interpretation (the prevailing orthodoxy in 1935), the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment remains a defining touchstone for modern interpretations of quantum mechanics. Physicists often use the way each interpretation deals with Schrödinger's cat as a way of illustrating and comparing the particular features, strengths, and weaknesses of each interpretation. Schrödinger wrote: Schrödinger's famous thought experiment poses the question, ""when" does a quantum system stop existing as a superposition of states and become one or the other?" (More technically, when does the actual quantum state
Measurement in quantum mechanics bit more convenient to write the Hilbert space as a direct sum of multiple eigen"spaces". The probability of measuring a particular eigenvalue is the squared component of the state vector in the corresponding eigenspace, and the new state after measurement is the projection of the original state vector into the appropriate eigenspace. Instead of performing quantum-mechanics computations in terms of wave functions (kets), it is sometimes necessary to describe a quantum-mechanical system in terms of a density matrix. The analysis in this case is formally slightly different, but the physical content is the same, and indeed this case can be