Schrodinger's Cat. Computer artwork depicting the famous 'Schrodinger's Cat' thought experiment. The image shows a cat both dead (grey) and alive (ginger) inside a box on a starfield background. The orbitals of a radioactive isotope are superimposed over the cat. In this hypothetical situation, the cat is thought to be both alive and dead until observed. This is because a quantum event (the decay of a radioac- tive particle) is set up to trigger the release of a lethal poison from a vial (not seen here) that kills the cat. According to quantum physics, the unstable particle exists in an intermediate 'probabilistic' state until it is observed.