This is a story of a set of events that seem unrelated...

Is everyone familiar with the Monty Hall problem? This is probably a much more humane way to start thinking about our Quantum world, rather than locking Schrödinger's cat in a box with a radioactive decay triggering poison mechanism, which has a 50/50 chance of killing the poor animal.

Imagine that you are a contestant on a game show, and you are presented with 3 identical closed doors, with a prize behind each door. Behind two of the doors is a goat, and the third door has a brand new car (or some other more desirable prize than a goat).

So, as the contestant, you are allowed to choose one of the three doors. That is a 1 in 3 chance of picking the good prize, right?

Imagine if the game show host - after you have picked your door - then opens one of the other doors to reveal one of the two goats. Now, you are given the choice: are you going to stick with the door you picked, or switch to the other door?

If you believe individual events in reality are probabalistically unrelated, you might be thinking "it makes no difference". Perhaps you have even gone as far as to think that "it's 50/50 now that there are 2 doors remaining". In other words, it seems like there is no advantage to switching your choice, according to our intuition.

What if I told you that I could be twice as successful at this game show than you, if you went with your intuition, to 'stick' because it makes no difference?

Yes, that's right... 'sticking' with 1 in 3 odds means you'll be right just over 33% of the time.

However, there is a 2 in 3 chance that we would have picked a door with a goat, so when the gameshow host shows the other goat, I will definitely get the car if I switch. This means that I can win the car, nearly 67% of the time.

Tags: #physics