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That's pretty much it. This is the result of a kid's book in which a boy goes searching through parallel universes to try and find his dead mother, and there are explanations of Schrodinger's Cat and quantum entanglement along the way.

I am an arts graduate and clueless: the project is supposed to fit into a shoebox. Any help will be much appreciated.

Susannah MW
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because there is no actual conceptual query in it. –  Oct 19 '16 at 13:05
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    I think this could be turned into a reasonable conceptual question: does such a demonstration exist, or is quantum mechanics somehow too subtle for a nine-year-old to discover in a shoebox-sized apparatus made of household stuff? However in its current form this may be a list question. – rob Oct 19 '16 at 13:22
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    One idea: it's pretty easy to build a double-slit interferometer using a laser pointer and a staple or a hair or a microscope slide. If you polarize the light differently on the two sides of the slit, the interference pattern is destroyed. – rob Oct 19 '16 at 13:31
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    Second idea: with a diffraction grating spectrometer, you can observe discrete emission spectra from lamps and the absorption spectrum of sunlight. The line spectra can't be explained without quantum mechanics. – rob Oct 19 '16 at 13:37
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    using a laser pointer and a staple or a hair or a microscope slide or a nit comb or pencil leads or... – Christoph Oct 19 '16 at 13:43
  • a permanent magnet – Bort Oct 19 '16 at 13:57
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    the photoelectric effect: instructions, video – Christoph Oct 19 '16 at 14:06
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    With a cloud chamber and a needle source (the link is CotS, and no paper work for buyers in the US. I believe similar suppliers exist for Europe and Japan) you can observe the stochastic nature of quantum emission. Hard to prove it is quantum without math beyond what is available in grade school, but that is true of @rob's nice emission/absorption spectra idea, too. You can also observe cosmic ray secondaries. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Oct 19 '16 at 15:34
  • Use the shoe box to demonstrate Schrodinger's Cat. Cover one half, place a sheet of glass at 45 degrees in the other half. In the closed half use a torch or bulb to project an image of a live cat from a slide onto the tilted glass, so that it can be seen reflected when looking down into the box. (Or use a hole in the side of the box to let light in, instead of the torch.)Vertically below the tilted glass place a picture of a dead cat. When the lid of the box is removed you can see both images superimposed. – sammy gerbil Oct 19 '16 at 21:41

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