Editor’s note (10/9/2012): We are making the text of this
article freely available for 30 days because the article was
cited by the Nobel Committee as a further reading in the
announcement of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics. The full
article with images, which originally appeared in the June 1997
issue, is available for purchase here. “I am sorry that I ever
had anything to do with quantum theory,” Erwin Schrödinger
reportedly complained to a colleague. The Austrian physicist was
not lamenting the fate of his now famous cat, which he
figuratively placed in a box with a vial of poison in 1935.
Rather he was commenting on the strange implications of quantum
mechanics, the science behind electrons, atoms, photons and
other things submicroscopic. With his feline, Schrödinger
attempted to illustrate the problem: according to quantum
mechanics, particles jump from point to point, occupy several
places at once and seem to communicate faster than the speed of
light. So why don’t cats—or baseballs or planets or people