How Schrödinger’s Cat Got Famous
T he world’s most famous cat seems to be everywhere—and nowhere. It appears on cartoons, T-shirts, board games, puzzle boxes, and glow-in-the-dark coffee cups. There’s even a gin named after the celebrity animal—boasting “a strong backbone of juniper.”
But its origin story is almost as mysterious as the scientific principle it was enlisted to illustrate. While Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger concocted the conceit of the cat, he was not the one who popularized it. The fictitious animal only really entered wider public consciousness after American science-fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin published a short story called “Schrödinger’s Cat,” 50 years ago. It was just one of dozens of works published by Le Guin, who died in 2018 after a long and celebrated career.
Schrödinger originally invented the cat image as a gag. If true believers in quantum mechanics are right that the microworld’s uncertainties are dispelled only when we observe it, Schrödinger felt, this must also sometimes happen in the macroworld, an absurdity that violates common sense. Writing in a paper published in 1935 in the German-language journal Naturwissenschaften, he presented his famous cat-in-a-box image to demonstrate just how foolish this notion was.
