If a Tree Falls in the Forest: Schrodinger’s Cat

I recently bought a series of lectures from The Teaching Company entitled Redefining Reality: The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science. The lectures are presented by Professor Steven Gimbel from Gettysburg College who discusses changes in understanding of reality over time mostly in scientific and mathematical terms, though he does touch on philosophy. In one of the lectures he spoke about the Schrodinger Equation and the Schrodinger’s Cat experiment. I think this experiment gives a more elegant explanation than I did in previous posts on the Zen coan which asks: “if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, is there a sound?” Following quotes are from the lecture: “When a quantum system is not observed, it occupies a state of superposition; it is in a combination of every possible state it could occupy. But the instant we observe the system, it collapses into one state, The Schrodinger Equation gives us the odds that we will find it in each of the possibilities, but the best we get is a probability.” The Schrodinger’s Cat is a thought experiment that I will try to condense and hopefully not get wrong in the process. “We can create a pair of electrons that when we do not look at them are in superposed states of clockwise and counterclockwise spin, but as soon as we observe one, both collapse into a single state such that one is always opposite of the other, but we will never know which will be which.” The experiment imagines a box into which is placed this created electron pair, a “spin” detector, a poison capsule and a cat. If the detector senses one direction it does nothing, while the other direction triggers a mechanism which bursts the capsule releasing the poison gas, killing the cat. A button is pushed turning on the detector and the electron collapses from its superposed state. Everything in the box, is a physical thing, all atoms, and while unobserved “all are in a superposed state in a grand entangled system”. As long as we don’t open the box, the cat, also being in a superposed state, existing in every possible position, is both alive and dead. Once the box is opened (there is a listener in the forest), the cat collapses into a single state and is either dead or alive (who hears the sound of the tree falling), depending on which way the detector happened to sense the spin direction. I imagine the same can be said of the forest. Everything there is in a superposed state in an entangled system and until observed, there is not only no tree but no forest.