The cat in the box! Have you ever heard of the cat in the box? Well, have you ever heard of Erwin Schroedinger? He is the man who first understood that the act of observing affected what was observed. He came up with this idea of putting a cat in a box. Along with the cat is a device with an atom that could decay (radioactive decay) and cause a poison to be released and kill the cat. Or, the same atom could decay and not cause the release of a poison and the cat would live. It all depends on the nature of the atom’s decay. Since the probability of the atom decay one way or the other is 50-50 we have no way of knowing which way the atom decayed until we opened the box and looked at the cat.