Nine leading thinkers interpret the meaning of Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment. Amanda Gefter; Sheldon Goldstein; Jenann Ismael; Chiara Marletto; Tim Maudlin; Alyssa Ney; Tim Palmer; Carlo Rovelli; Lev Vaidman.
Introduction
Contemporary versions of Erwin Schrödinger’s famous cat thought experiment often prefer to use sleeping gas instead of cyanide. But for a cat in a box to be both asleep and awake - as opposed to the original cat which was both dead and alive - is, if decidedly less cruel, just as strange.
Writing to Einstein in 1935, Schrödinger’s imaginary experimental set-up was designed to expose the critical flaws of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which holds that quantum systems stay in a superposition of two or more states until the system interacts with an external observer [1]].
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