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Too soon, their good-natured gatherings came to a halt. Together they enjoyed raucus Viennese sausage parties-the Wiener Würstelabende bashes that Schrödinger hosted at his house-and sailing on the lake near Einstein’s summer home. Schrödinger, a dapper Austrian, had been elevated to a professorship at the University of Berlin in 1927, just one year after introducing his wave equation for quantum mechanics (now known simply as the Schrödinger equation). His schedule became punctuated with earthly concerns-League of Nations committee meetings, stumping for Zionist causes-alongside his scientific pursuits. By that time, Einstein’s theory of relativity had catapulted him to worldwide fame. The two had solidified their friendship in the late 1920s, when they were both living in Berlin. Schrödinger crafted his cat scenario during the summer of 1935, in close dialogue with Albert Einstein. the death of knowledge: The disturbing and violent events taking place in Europe in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, including book burnings like this one, impacted all levels of life at the time-right down to what sorts of metaphors scientists used to describe their work.
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It also reminds us that scientists are, like the rest of us, humans who feel-and fear. 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. 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.