Station 1
🐱 Cat
DE
Station 1

Schrödinger Box

Alive and dead — as long as nobody looks. Here stands the box that made a theoretical cat very famous.

Stylised cat, half blue, half red

On site

Crack the puzzles that keep Schrödinger's cat locked in, and open the box!

Box 1easy
Engraving on box 1: cats, a cardboard box and the words Schrödinger's cat is alive and dead
Box 2hard
Engraving on box 2: Quantum Enclosure System with a living and a decaying cat

What is superposition?

A classical bit is 0 or 1. A quantum particle can be both at once until someone measures it. That is not a lack of knowledge about a value that was fixed long ago, but a state of its own. And that very state can be used for computing.

Quick questions

Is the cat really dead and alive?

No — and that was exactly Schrödinger's point. He came up with the example in 1935 as a criticism: if you naively apply the quantum rules to big things, you get nonsense. For single particles, however, superposition is measurably, precisely true.

Why does the superposition collapse when you look?

Because “looking” is never passive. Every measurement couples the particle to its surroundings — this process is called decoherence. The bigger an object, the faster it happens: for a real cat in an unimaginably short time.

What is it good for?

Superposition is the engine of quantum computers: a qubit can be 0 and 1 at the same time, and together with interference this is where the computing power comes from. What a qubit looks like is shown at Station 2.

What's in the boxes?

In front of you are two wooden boxes, each with four combination locks. Whoever solves all the puzzles of a box and manages to open it can look forward to a small surprise.

And now

The two boxes

Each box comes with four puzzles. Each one gives you a four-digit code, and each code opens one of the locks. The order doesn't matter and your progress stays saved on this phone.

🔒 Box 1 · easy Four locks · 0/4 solved 🐈‍⬛ Box 2 · hard Four locks · 0/4 solved