Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

Two aliens discuss Schrodinger's Cat with a human. The human explains that due to the quantum nature of a system, a cat can be both alive and dead at once until you observe it, and asks how something can "be both" in reality. The first alien proposes a "trivial solution": kill all cats, so if all cats are dead, the one in the box is dead -- no ambiguity. The human objects that there is also a version where the cat is both exploded and not exploded until observed. The alien then proposes a "trivial solution: explode all Schrodingers." When the human protests, the alien says: "No, I'm not. This is easily resolvable. Find all things that could exist in two or more states and reduce them to one state. Done. No paradoxes." The other alien enthusiastically agrees: "That is OBVIOUSLY right. Let's do it." In a bonus panel set two billion years later, a professor asks why the universe collapsed into a single state after the Big Bang, and someone answers "Nobody knows."

The Humor

The comic satirizes the way non-experts (here, aliens) try to "solve" deep physics paradoxes with brute-force literalism. Rather than grapple with quantum superposition as a fundamental feature of reality, the aliens keep proposing to simply destroy one branch of each superposition -- kill all the cats, explode all the Schrodingers, and ultimately collapse everything in the universe to a single state. The escalation is the core of the humor: each "trivial solution" is more absurdly destructive than the last. The bonus panel punchline suggests that the aliens actually followed through on their plan, and this is the reason the universe collapsed into a single state after the Big Bang -- retroactively "explaining" cosmology as the result of aliens who were too impatient to understand quantum mechanics.

References

• Schrodinger's Cat is a famous thought experiment proposed by physicist Erwin Schrodinger in 1935, illustrating the apparent absurdity of applying quantum superposition to everyday objects. In the thought experiment, a cat in a sealed box is simultaneously alive and dead until the box is opened and the cat is observed.
• The Big Bang is the prevailing cosmological model explaining the origin of the universe from an initial singularity approximately 13.8 billion years ago.