The 13 y.o.: So, let me get this straight…according to Einstein, you put Schrodinger’s cat in a box with some unstable gun powder that has 50-percent likelihood of blowing up in the next hour. And you don’t know if the cat is dead or alive in the box until you look.

The Mom: Right. Half the time kitty is alive and the other half, kitty goes bye-bye.

The 13 y.o.: Why didn’t Einstein use his own cat? Never mind. Ok, so there are two realities inside this cat-killing box: the cat is either dead from the gun powder exploding or alive because nothing happened. But…what if the cat starves to death?

The Mom: It’s a theory. The cat doesn’t really exist. It is a paradox.

The 13 y.o.: Are you being ironic?

The Mom: Look – the point of the theory according to quantum mechanics, is that the cat either exists or doesn’t exist because of an earlier random event. The cat is both alive and dead, regardless whether the box is opened, but the alive cat and the dead cat are in different branches of the universe that are both real to the cat, but the “dead” cat and the “alive” cat exist in different states and cannot interact with one another. Then, when opening the box to see what happened to the cat, the observer becomes entangled with the cat’s outcome.

The 13 y.o.: What sicko is watching the cat explode? That’s just cruel. So, what about from the cat’s perspective? Isn’t the cat an observer too? Either she sees the gun powder and then her own explosion or she sees that there isn’t any gun powder.

The Dad: Unless the cat is blind.