Schrödinger's cat regard the "alive and dead" cat superposition as quite real. Intended as a critique of the Copenhagen interpretation (the prevailing orthodoxy in 1935), the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment remains a defining touchstone for modern interpretations of quantum mechanics. Physicists often use the way each interpretation deals with Schrödinger's cat as a way of illustrating and comparing the particular features, strengths, and weaknesses of each interpretation. Schrödinger wrote: Schrödinger's famous thought experiment poses the question, ""when" does a quantum system stop existing as a superposition of states and become one or the other?" (More technically, when does the actual quantum state
Einstein's thought experiments Einstein concluded that "it is impossible to discover by experiment whether a given system of coordinates is accelerated, or whether...the observed effects are due to a gravitational field." This correspondence between gravitational mass and inertial mass is the "equivalence principle". An extension to his accelerating observer thought experiment allowed Einstein to deduce that "rays of light are propagated curvilinearly in gravitational fields." Many myths have grown up about Einstein's relationship with quantum mechanics. Freshman physics students are aware that Einstein explained the photoelectric effect and introduced the concept of the photon. But students who have grown up with the photon