The Two Lives of Schrödinger's Cat

A lively account of Schrödinger’s cat and its adoption in popular culture, showing how quantum mechanics can help us come to terms with modern lifeIn the 1920s, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg helped to establish a radical new way to think about the atom. Although the new theory worked, nobody really understood it. Unsatisfied, Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger sought to point out its flaws, and Schrödinger devised a thought experiment involving his famous cat. It had little impact at the time, but was resurrected in the 1950s as the debate about the meaning of quantum mechanics was revived.Then something very strange happened. As Jim Baggott explains, Schrödinger’s cat found a second life in the ‘70s and ‘80s—reinterpreted by sci-fi novelists, California hippies, and popular science writers. Today, Schrödinger’s cat and quantum concepts are used as metaphors to describe everything from human psychology to social science.This is the dramatic tale of how a quantum paradox changed the way we think—and what more it could tell us about society, politics, and modern life in a post-truth social reality.