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Schrödinger’s cat, then, should remind us of more than the beguiling strangeness of quantum mechanics. It’s no coincidence that, in the face of a looming World War, genocide, and the dismantling of German intellectual life, Schrödinger’s thoughts turned to poison, death, and destruction. Others, like Einstein, insisted that nature must choose: alive or dead, but not both.Īlthough Schrödinger’s cat flourishes as a meme to this day, discussions tend to overlook one key dimension of the fable: the environment in which Schrödinger conceived it in the first place. In Schrödinger’s own time, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg proclaimed that hybrid states like the one the cat was supposed to be in were a fundamental feature of nature. 1 It has also become the standard bearer for a host of quandaries in philosophy and physics. Today, in our LOLcats-saturated world, Schrödinger’s strange little tale is often played for laughs, with a tone more zany than somber. According to proponents of the theory, before anyone opened the box to check on the cat, the cat was neither alive nor dead it existed in a strange, quintessentially quantum state of alive-and-dead. Schrödinger dreamt up this gruesome scenario to mock what he considered a ludicrous feature of quantum theory. If no radioactivity is detected, the cat lives. If the radioactive material happens to decay, then a device releases a hammer, which smashes a vial of poison, which kills the cat. It describes a cat locked inside a windowless box, along with some radioactive material.
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In pop culture at least, the kitty is very much alive.Of all the bizarre facets of quantum theory, few seem stranger than those captured by Erwin Schrödinger’s famous fable about the cat that is neither alive nor dead. But without a furry mascot, that idea is unlikely to unseat Schrödinger’s cat in the general consciousness. They discuss a superposition of different states using framework called decoherence, where the "collapse" that introduces all the confusion about dead and alive cats isn’t necessary. Now, many experiments and non-physics papers reference the idea. From the pages of that popular magazine, science fiction writers took the cat into other realms. So how did the cat make the leap from an aside to main event? The first time the feline ventured beyond discussions among physicists appears to be when philosopher Hilary Putnam wrote a 1965 book about quantum mechanics and then discussed the oddness of Schrödinger’s cat during in a review of his book for Scientific American, Halpern reports. Yet, like any haughty housecat, Schrödinger’s cat has ended up dominating the whole manor. Schrödinger’s paper is a spacious mansion of an article, in which the kitty conundrum occupies just a windowsill-sized space. Even the original appearance of the cat was brief.
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That’s because from 1935, when the physicist wrote about the idea, until his death in 1961, the cat scarcely showed up in research literature. In this age of internet cat videos, that isn’t surprising, but Schrödinger himself would probably be bemused at the popularity of his cat. Halpern points out that nearly everyone has heard about Schrödinger’s cat, at least as the punch line of a joke. Since decay is random, there is no way to predict when it will happen for an individual atom, "collapsing" - as quantum mechanics puts it - the multiple possibilities into a single outcome. In the thought experiment, the cat’s fate is tied to the fate of a radioactive sample, explains Paul Halpern at NOVA. Schrödinger originally wrote about the cat to make it clear exactly how weird quantum physics can get. Or at least it would if it were a particle. The uncertainty of the cat’s state - alive or dead - means that it exists in a superposition of simultaneously dead and alive. This is the basic story of Schrödinger’s Cat, a thought experiment physicist Erwin Schrödinger first proposed 80 years ago today. But no one can know the feline’s fate until they look. It may be dead or it may be alive, because also in that small space is a vial of poisonous gas that has a 50/50 chance of releasing its destruction upon kitty. ANDRZEJ WOJCICKI/Science Photo Library/Corbis