Schrödinger’s cat, thought experiment designed by theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 as an objection to the reigning Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Often considered as central to quantum physics as Isaac Newton’s laws of motion are to classical physics, the Schrödinger equation, which he had devised in 1926, is essentially a wave equation that describes the form of probability waves (or wave functions) that govern the motion of small particles and how these waves change over time. Solutions to the equation take the form of wave functions that can only be related to the probable occurrence of physical events. Schrödinger used the equation to predict the qualities of a hydrogen atom, and the equation remains a fundamental building block of quantum mechanics.
However, Schrödinger himself was displeased with how the equation came to be interpreted, namely, the Copenhagen interpretation (so called because its main proponent, Niels Bohr, lived in that city). Unlike Newton’s equations of motion, which provided concrete answers to questions of the universe, the Copenhagen interpretation of Schrödinger’s equation depended on the more abstract notion of probability. Instead of precise locations and quantities, quantum mechanics could only produce results no more concrete than the probability of an electron existing in a certain spot after a certain amount of time.
Schrödinger felt that while quantum mechanics was valid in describing the blurriness of the subatomic world, applying quantum mechanics indiscriminately led to strange consequences, writing in his paper “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics” (1935):
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 course of 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 which 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 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.
Schrödinger’s cat argues that, in the Copenhagen interpretation, until an observer opens the box and reveals the cat’s fate, the cat is both alive and dead—a state described as a “superposition.” Schrödinger thought that the cat being both alive and dead was “quite ridiculous” and intended his thought experiment to challenge other scientists’ suppositions about quantum mechanics. However, scientists have since been able to place particles such as ions and photons in superposed states. French physicist Serge Haroche and American physicist David Wineland won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physics for their work in devising experiments to create such “Schrödinger cat states,” in which particles can be observed as simultaneously being in two different states.