Schrödinger’s Cat  is probably the strangest fictional cat since Alice in Wonderland. Stuck in a box alive and dead until viewed by a sadistic scientist who could be the inspiration for a Bond villain.

To recap the famous thought experiment, a cat is put in a box with a number of objects: Some atomic level material that has a 50% chance of decaying within one hour, a Geiger counter that will detect if that decay took place, and a hammer that is rigged to break a phial of cyanide if the Geiger counter detects radiation. If the cyanide is released the cat will die.

Let’s just back up there. There is basically a 50% chance of the cat being killed, but instead of tossing a coin, an elaborate set up is created. Remind you of anything?

So far, so bizarre but now is where it gets really strange. According to this thought experiment the cat is both alive and dead until the scientist opens the box at the one hour mark. At that point the cat, because it is observed, must become only alive or dead. It is the act of observation that collapses the dual nature of the cat.

Are you possibly thinking something along these lines – The cat is either dead or alive regardless of whether the scientist opens the box or not! This is complete nonsense!

If you are thinking that, you are in good company. Schrödinger developed the thought experiment through a series of correspondence with Einstein to show how ridiculous certain aspects of quantum mechanics were at a macro level.

Physics was stuck with a problem. Some things, such as light and sub atomic particles appear to have contradictory characteristics. Light mostly behaves like a wave but travels through a vacuum which means it should be a particle. At a simplistic level, the solution proposed was that when you observe it; it is one or the other. When it is not observed, it is both at once.

Schrödinger was basically blowing this theory up to something large and comprehensible to show the problem with this solution.

It remains the case, though, that the dual and parallel nature of some sub-atomic particles is a very useful way of understanding and predicting their behavior.

So what does it all mean?

There’s two ways of approaching this puzzle

1. Our knowledge is currently inadequate for explaining the phenomenon
2. The cat is alive and dead

Let’s have a look at those two possibilities.

1. Inadequate knowledge

Our knowledge or perception is incomplete. Although our way of thinking about this bizarre subatomic behaviour is useful, it is not reality. Some of Newton’s theories were useful up to a point, but not complete. They were superseded by Einstein and others. Current scientific thought will be improved on and altered in the same way. This is the way science works.

Another way of saying the same thing is this:

The map is not the territory…  The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map

Alfred Korzybski

A London Underground map helps us get around, so it’s very useful, but it’s actually very inaccurate in all sorts of ways, including scale.

 2. The cat is alive and dead

But how could that happen in reality?

One way of explaining this is to have multiple universes that account for all possibilities. Now we can have the cat being alive and dead. When the box is opened, the universe splits in two, with one universe having the alive cat and the other having the dead cat.

We have a multiverse that contains all conditions for everything.

As crazy as this sounds from a commonsense point of view, there are many physicists that believe in the Many Worlds Theory. This was, in part, developed by Hugh Everett by expanding on the cat analogy and developing a framework in which it would work.

This has also resulted in many terrible TV shows and movies based on this premise.

If the multiverse option is really true, there is a universe where Erwin Schrödinger has got Albert Einstein round for the night to have few beers and watch a box set of DC Comic’s Flash Season 2. They are watching one of the Earth 2 based episodes and Albert is giving Erwin a hard time about the cat. Erwin is shrugging and saying ‘how could I have expected people to take it seriously?’