Of course, if you have Schodinger’s Cat, you must have a Schodinger.
Today is his birthday, of all things. Erwin Schrödinger, to be exact, was born August 12, 1887, in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. Funny, really. His Astrological Sign is Leo. The Lion. A Cat.
Sometimes the Universe…..
Anyway. He was a Physicist and Nobel Laureate. He did a lot of the brainwork in the early development of Quantum Physics. Quantum Theory and wave mechanics and all. But, he is probably best known for his cat. Or the paradox, thereof.
If you don’t know it, Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment. Here’s the groundwork for the whole deal. To this very day, the Quantum Brains are still trying to work things out in all this smarty business. They were trying to work things out back then too. There was a proposal called the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. It says, that after a while, two separate states, two realities, can occur at the same time. A superposition occurs in these states.
It gets kind of complicated from here out. In Schrodinger’s model, the theoretical cat is placed in a make-believe sealed box. There is poison involved, and radioactive materials. Mayhem, really. All of which kills the cat. All because a particle decayed, and a Geiger counter found out about it. But, in the world of Quantum, never fear. You either take the Blue Pill or the Red Pill. So before you look in the made-up box, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time.
There were two proposals in all of this, back then. The Copenhagen Interpretation and Schrodinger’s Cat Paradox.
Regardless. We have a dead cat on our hands. And / or we don’t.
But the true story is this. Well, my theory. Erwin loved cats. Like I said, he was a Leo. He got married in 1920 to Annemarie Berte, and they were madly in love. But she hated cats. They made her jumpy. When she was six and playing at Furgerhugen Park, a black cat jumped out of the bushes and landed squarely on her shoulders. It scared the little lacy socks right off her feet. Since that time, she loathed cats. But Erwin truly wanted one. They fought. Then, he started toying with this whole Schrodinger’s Cat thing. He told is wife, they could have a cat, for a pet, in their house. But according to Quantum Physics, it wouldn’t really be there because of its state of superposition. Eventually, they got a cat named Little Helga, and she lived to be 18 years old. But not really, according to Erwin.
One time, he was sitting in his chair with Little Helga, who wasn’t really there, listening to Mozart, and he said “Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.”
And there you have it.
He died January 4, 1961 (aged 73) of Tuberculosis. Or not.
The lesson here is to be your best self today. Because the person you meet on the road, might be yourself, walking from the other direction.
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“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
― Albert Einstein
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“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”
― Lao Tzu
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“One person’s craziness is another person’s reality.”
― Tim Burton
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Like THIS:
“The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one pries open that metal box and takes a peep inside, one sees the cat either alive or dead. But, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.
In simple terms, Schrödinger stated that if you place a cat and something that could kill the cat (a radioactive atom) in a box and sealed it, you would not know if the cat was dead or alive until you opened the box, so that until the box was opened, the cat was (in a sense) both “dead and alive”. This is used to represent how scientific theory works. No one knows if any scientific theory is right or wrong until said theory can be tested and proved.” (Wiki)