Schrödinger’s Cat
Physicist Erwin Schrödinger did not like quantum theory; its weird properties offended his classical biases. A valiant defender (along with Einstein) of the Newtonian universe (where God did not play dice) the fact of indeterminacy proposed by Born and Heisenberg was obscene to him, a contradiction to the entire scientific project with its orderly cosmos governed by deterministic (read mechanical) laws that could be verified and known by Man. The new concept of quantum superposition implied that two contradictory states existed at the same time only to leap to one position, or the other, upon human observation. To illustrate just how absurd this was he devised a diabolical thought experiment: imagine a cat inside of a steel box; also in the box is small amount of radioactive material that may or may not trigger a Geiger counter to swing a hammer, smashing a vial of cyanide and so killing the cat. The weird quality of quantum superposition means that, until we open the box to observe its state, the unobserved box would contain both—in Schrödinger’s words—a “living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.” Quantum weirdness aside—of which I understand very little—this fable interests us today because of how it has grown the antinomies of feline heresy. For is not the true heresy of this cat—its wicked indeterminacy—the true heresy of all cats? Is not feline excess precisely this flickering, this rapid movement between incompatible worlds? Why else do cats have nine lives? The mixed or smeared cat is both an indestructible style icon from time immemorial, and a catastrophe, an extinction event of feline overpopulation. The cat is seductive and cute beyond measure; the cat is supreme killer, indifferent to humanity. An unholy mixture, the cat is victim of untold suffering at human hands and a literal house-god, lavished and worshipped, lord of the internet. From the superposition of these diverse states, the cat makes a circle that cannot be squared, a living contradiction that gets to the schizophrenic chasm of our undecidable reality—a reality rather more real than Schrödinger, or his science, could accept. And yet his thought experiment has intuited a truth: unlike Einstein’s God, cats do play dice with the universe.
