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
Quantum mechanics the Copenhagen Interpretation from an epistemological point of view. In arguing for his views, he produced a series of objections, the most famous of which has become known as the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox. John Bell showed that this EPR paradox led to experimentally testable differences between quantum mechanics and theories that rely on added hidden variables. Experiments have been performed confirming the accuracy of quantum mechanics, thereby demonstrating that quantum mechanics cannot be improved upon by addition of hidden variables. Alain Aspect's initial experiments in 1982, and many subsequent experiments since, have definitively verified quantum entanglement. By the early 1980s, experiments