With Quantum Suicide, You'd Go On Living Forever
With Quantum Suicide, You'd Go On Living Forever The laws of the quantum world are so bizarre that if you follow them to their logical conclusions, you get some very strange results. That's why quantum physics is so full of thought experiments. You may have heard of Schrödinger's cat, for example: if you put a cat in a box with a vial of poison that has a 50/50 chance of killing the cat, the cat is both alive and dead—in a superposition of states, you might say—until you open the box. Well, try the quantum suicide thought experiment on for size: in that scenario, you're the cat—except you never die. Quantum Suicide, Explained The quantum suicide thought experiment was first posed by Max Tegmark in 1997, and it goes something like this: Imagine a gun is hooked up to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle every time the trigger is pulled. If the particle is measured as spinning clockwise, the gun will fire; if it's spinning counter-clo...