How Schrödinger’s Cat Became Such a Violent Fable
Two deeply unrelated quotes that I find apply here. The first is from a segment on a Christmas special of the British radio comedy panel show, <i>The Unbelievable Truth</i>, and the second is Einstein&#x27;s.<p><i>&quot;Schrodinger, philosophic science whiz
popped a kitty in his
a pretty kitty and says
‘If you open the box, the &#x27;lectric shocks.’
&#x27;Don’t touch the box… the cat is now a paradox.’
&#x27;Both dead and alive is the feline situation’
&#x27;But its status will be changed by the act of observation’
The main thing that we learn from that: Schrodinger did not like cats.&quot;</i> -Rufus Hound<p><i>“[I advocate] that one conceives of the psi-function [i.e., wavefunction] only as an incomplete description of a real state of affairs, where the incompleteness of the description is forced by the fact that observation of the state is only able to grasp part of the real factual situation. Then one can at least escape the singular conception that observation (conceived as an act of consciousness) influences the real physical state of things; the change in the psi-function through observation then does not correspond essentially to the change in a real matter of fact but rather to the alteration in our knowledge of this matter of fact.”</i> -Albert Einstein