Schrödinger’s Cat belongs to a growing body of images and concepts from quantum physics and cosmology which have either become new global mythologems or are developing towards
mythologem status. The Cat is arguably one of the fully developed ones and has been in use as such for quite a while.
Erwin Schrödinger (Vienna, 1887 – 1961), Austrian physicist, won the Nobel Prize in 1933 for his contribution to quantum mechanics, in particular the “Schrödinger equation”. In response to an article by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in the scientific publication
Naturwissenschaften, he proposed the following thought experiment:
“A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following diabolical device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of one hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it. The Psi function (the wave function describing the sum of all possible states of a system, LL) for the entire system would express this by having in it the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.” (Quoted from John Trimmer’s 1980 English translation of Schrödinger’s 1935 essay Die gegenwartige Situation in der Quantenmechanik. The quote was taken from the Wikipedia page on Schrödinger’s Cat.)
What does this experiment mean? It means that reality – the object of scientific and all other human enquiry – exists as a superposition of probabilities rather than a single, definable phenomenon. The wave function of reality (in this case, of the cat) describes the sum of all those probabilities, not as a sequence but as a “mixture” or, as Schrödinger puts it, a smear. Making an observation collapses the wave (the function) and we are left with a single state: a “dead cat reality” or a “live cat reality”.
If we can snap out of the state of fascination with this proposal, we cannot fail to see that it demands a serious re-thinking of the way we understand not only the world of physical objects but also the principles of ethics, our concept of history and in fact absolutely everything. Did we kill the cat by observing it? Did we save its life? What is that cat’s life when it is unobserved? Are we the only possible observer or can the environment in the box be an observer, too – or can indeed the cat be its own observer? In that case the cat is probably immortal, as the function collapses the very instant it starts and there is no time for the atom in the Geiger counter to decay…
Schrödinger’s Cat, image by “Anarkman”, Wikipedia, 2005