Does this mean we now have two dead cats?
Does this mean we now have two dead cats?
No, one live and one dead cat. They are complementary.
Einstein had a much better analogy for mixed eignestates, and his version had no cat and did not involve potentially problematic metaphysical questions about whether there is a bounded Hermitean operator corresponding to "Life" or "Death." In his paradox, there is a keg of gunpowder in Schroedinger's Box. The question then becomes, when a quantum of radiation is introduced, is the gunpowder in an (un)exploded state or a mixed state of the two?
He argued that not even the most strident defender of quantum mechanics would remain in the room, secure in the belief that the gunpowder was in a mixed combination of eigenstates until the box was actually open.
Probably true.
That paradox is stripped of the silly aspects of the Schroedinger's Cat paradox, but for the same reason did not catch on in the imaginations of popular science writers who don't really understand science very well.
Assuming something that I don't believe -- that there's a quantum mechanical operator corresponding to "Life" -- for the purposes of advancing a hypothetical, if you could find a complementary physical property for a two-cat state, flipping that state in the near cat could kill the remote cat and bring the local cat back to life. Flipping that eigenstate again would bring the remote dead cat back to life, and kill the local one.
This is instructive in the instant case because no one believes physics can bring a dead entity back to life once truly dead. A perfectly good alternative explanation -- precisely because the two cats are indistinguishable -- is that you have merely teleported the dead cat to the live cat's former location, while teleporting the live cat back at the same time.