There is a saying that cats have nine lives. Schrödinger, in his thought experiment, clearly shows that a cat has only one.
Schrödinger actually despised his cat in a box theory, which he invented as a way to mock the current theory of quantum mechanics and, in the process, accidentally created a fantastic example of quantum mechanics.
Who is Erwin Schrödinger?
Erwin Schrödinger was born on August 12, 1887, in Vienna, Germany. Schrödinger was a highly gifted individual with a wide range of interests in different fields of studies. Schrödinger was known to like scientific disciplines, the logic of ancient grammar and German poetry. (Source: Nobel Prize)
Schrödinger became a master of eigenvalue problems in the physics of continuous media in 1906 up until he served as an artillery officer in the first world war. After his service, he took up several roles in the academic field.
He was an assistant to some great minds like Hasenöhrl from 1906 to 1910, Franz Exner during the same time he assisted Hasenöhrl and Max Wien in 1920.
Schrödinger took up professor roles in different leading universities, Stuttgart, Breslau, and Zurich, that lasted six years. He also took a few other positions at various universities in Berlin, Oxford, Princeton, Graz. Soon after, Schrödinger moved to the newly created Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin, then became Director of the School for Theoretical Physics. He stayed in Dublin until his retirement in 1955. (Source: Nobel Prize)
Schrödinger’s life was dedicated to different fields of science, publishing many articles, papers, and even the book “What is Life.” Schrödinger was also credited with creating the foundation of quantum wave mechanics in 1926, now known as Schrödinger’s wave equation.
Schrödinger died on January 4, 1961, in his hometown Vienna, Germany, at the age of 74. (Source: Britannica)
Schrödinger’s Cat
Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment Schrödinger came up with within 1935. This was Schrödinger’s response to the quantum theory of probability in his earlier work on the Schrödinger equation. Schrödinger was unhappy with his earlier discovery that leads his theory on quantum physics as abstractly probable. (Source: Britannica)
One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following 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 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 that 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 of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.
Erwin Schrödinger
(Source: Archive)