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
Afshar experiment complementarity of quantum mechanics, which states roughly that the particle and wave aspects of quantum objects cannot be observed at the same time, and specifically the Englert–Greenberger duality relation. The experiment has been repeated by a number of investigators and its results have been confirmed, but its interpretation is controversial, and some disagree that it violates complementarity, while also disagreeing amongst themselves as to why. Afshar's experiment uses a variant of Thomas Young's classic double-slit experiment to create interference patterns to investigate complementarity. Such interferometer experiments typically have two "arms" or paths a photon may take. One of Afshar's assertions