If you have a cat at home or with one of your friends, you must have witnessed his strange passion for jumping into cardboard boxes and piling in them, this is not an isolated case, all cats are like this, and a question that puzzled veterinary scientists from Utrecht University: Does hiding in cardboard boxes reduce Stress in cats?
The answer is yes, according to the scientists found. They said that hiding in cardboard boxes really reduces stress, in the short term at least and that it is not just something for fun, but it is serious, so the stress of domestic cats when they go to shelters, it does not just make them unhappy. Rather, it affects its immunity and exposes it to infection.
The team led by Dr. Claudia Finke carried out this experiment by randomly dividing a sample of cats that had just arrived at the shelter from the home into two groups, one they supplied with boxes and the other, no, then they monitored their behavior for more than two weeks using a rate that measures stress and stress.
On the third day of the experiment, the scientists noticed that the rate of the tension of the cats deprived of the boxes was greater than the others, it is true that some of them were fine, but others were as well, then the rate of the two groups slowly approached with the passage of two weeks.
The number of cats that the experiment was conducted on was 19, and the research paper concluded that the hiding box appears to be useful for cats to adapt to the new stressful environmental conditions that were transferred to them, especially during the first week after their arrival, and the researchers hope to extend this work to longer-term studies.
As for the reason why cats love boxes, it is difficult to explain scientifically, Wired stated that it may be due to their love for warmth, or it is the way individual species of animals hide from social communication.
What is a Schrödinger cat?
Until the box is opened, the observer does not know whether the cat is alive or dead; This is because the fate of a cat is intrinsically tied to whether or not the atom has decayed. The cat, Schrödinger said, would be both alive and dead until spotted.
In other words, until the box is opened, the condition of the cat is not completely known, and therefore, the cat is alive and dead at the same time if not spotted. This is Schrödinger's cat experience.
“If you put the cat in the box, and if there is no way to know what it is doing, you have to treat it as if it is doing all possible things - life and death - at the same time,” says Eric Martell, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Milliken University.
If you try to predict and assume you know your cat's condition, you might be wrong. But, on the other hand, if you assume that the cat is in a set of all possible states that it could be, then you are right. ”
When looking at the cat, the observer knows immediately whether the cat is alive or dead. The superposition state of the cat (the idea that it is in either case) collapses upon knowing whether it is alive or dead, as it cannot be in either case.
Schrödinger developed the paradox, says Martell, to clarify a point in quantum mechanics about the nature of wave particles.
“What we discovered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is that there are very, very small things that do not obey Newton’s laws,” he says. The rules that we used to control the movement of a ball, a person, or a car to explain how the electron or the atom work cannot be applied.
The core of quantum theory - which is used to describe the way subatomic particles like electrons and protons behave - is the idea of a wave function. The wave function describes all possible possible states of the particles, including properties such as energy, momentum, and position. “A wave function is a combination of all possible wave functions,” Martell says.
The wave function of a particle indicates that there is some possibility that it can be in any possible position. But you don't necessarily know that it is in a certain location without realizing it. "If you put an electron around the nucleus, it could be in any state and in any possible location unless you look at it and know where it is." This is what Schrödinger was demonstrating with the paradox of the cat, he says.
“In any physical system, without observation, you cannot describe what something is doing,” Martell says. "You have to say that it may be any of these things that can happen even if the probability is small."
