Schrödinger’s Cat and Heisenberg’s Cut - by Jim Baggott

There are at least two kinds of Schrödinger’s cat. There is Schrödinger’s cat parody or paradox, short details of which the physicist Erwin Schrödinger published in the German scientific journal Naturwissenschaften in 1935. And there is a Schrödinger’s cat of popular culture. According to the Google Books Ngram Viewer, the latter started to rise to prominence in the 1960s and 70s. The philosopher and historian Robert P. Crease credits science fiction author Ursula Le Guin as the first to introduce Schrödinger’s cat into a work of literary fiction in 1974 (see here), it and really took off in the 80s along with the expanding market for popular science, science fiction, and science fantasy, with the number of references continuing to increase to 2019.

It is not difficult to understand the cat’s cultural appeal. In this version, ‘quantum theory says’ that a cat trapped in a closed box with a radioactive substance and a flask of deadly cyanide becomes suspended in a weird superposition state. It is somehow both alive and dead at the same time. It continues in this state until we lift the lid of the box, and look. At that moment, ‘quantum theory says’ that the wavefunction of the cat collapses, and it is instantaneously projected into one or other of the physical states that make up the superposition. It is alive, or it is dead. The act of looking either kills it, or doesn’t. ‘Le Guin was entranced by the implied uncertainties and appreciated the fantastic nature of Schrödinger’s image’.

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