Thank you for The Great Courses Plus for supporting PBS. To learn more click http://ow.ly/oSus30qpmwX PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Sign up for the mailing list to get episode notifications and hear special announcements! https://tinyurl.com/yx9cusk5 Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://pbsspacetime.com/ This episode of space time is brought to you by the information flowing through an impossibly complex network of quantum entanglement, that just happens to mutually agree that you and I exist inside it. Oh, and Schrodinger’s cat is in here too. Hosted by Matt O'Dowd Written by Matt O'Dowd Graphics by Leonardo Scholzer, Yago Ballarini, & Pedro Osinski Directed by: Andrew Kornhaber Executive Producers: Eric Brown & Andrew Kornhaber End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRl6-nb4iOnsij-vnpAjp0Q In quantum world things are routinely in multiple states at once - what we call a “superposition” of states. But in the classical world of large scales, things are either this or that. The famous thought experiment is Schrodinger’s cat - in which a cat is in an opaque box with a vial of deadly poison that’s released on the radioactive decay of an atom. Quantum mechanics tells us that the atom’s wavefunction can be in a superposition of states - simultaneously decayed or not decayed. So is the cat’s wavefunction also in a superposition of both dead and alive. Special Thanks to Our Patreon Sponsors Big Bang Sponsors Alexander Tamas David Nicklas Fabrice Eap Juan Benet Morgan Hough Radu Negulescu Quasar Sponsors Christina Oegren Mark Heising Vinnie Falco Hyper Nova Sponsors Chuck Zegar Danton Spivey Donal Botkin Edmund Fokschaner Hank S John Hofmann John Pollock John R. Slavik Jordan Young Joseph Salomone Julian Tyacke Justin Ash Mathew Matthew O'Connor Matthew Ryan Syed Ansar Timothy McCulloch Gamma Ray Burst Sponsors A G Adrian Hatch Adrien Molyneux AlecZero Andreas Nautsch Angela Prigge Arefa Ahmad Bradley Jenkins Brandon labonte Brandon Lattin Brian Blanchard Craig Stonaha Dan Warren Daniel Lyons David Bethala DFaulk Douglas Cantrell Eric Kiebler Frederic Simon Geoffrey Short Graydon Goss Greg Smith John Funai John Robinson Jonathan Nesfeder Josh Thomas Kevin Lee Kevin Warne Kyle Hofer Malte Ubl Michael Conroy Nick Virtue Nick Wright Nickolas Andrew Freeman Patrick Sutton Paul Rose Protius Protius Randall Sylvia Robert Ilardi Scott Gossett Sean Warniaha Shane Calimlim Sipke Schoorstra Steve Bradshaw Tatiana Vorovchenko Tim Stephani Tonyface Tybie Fitzhugh Yannick Weyns Yurii Konovaliuk