Schrödinger's cat in popular culture whales a call that they could locate each other by. Schrödinger's cat in popular culture Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment, usually described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday objects. The thought experiment presents a cat that might be alive or dead, depending on an earlier random event. In the course of developing this experiment, he coined the term "Verschränkung" (entanglement). It was not long before science-fiction writers picked up this evocative concept, often using it in
Expectation value (quantum mechanics) to calculate the average momentum, one uses the momentum operator "in configuration space", formula_65. Explicitly, its expectation value is Not all operators in general provide a measureable value. An operator that has a pure real expectation value is called an observable and its value can be directly measured in experiment. The expectation value, in particular as presented in the section "Formalism in quantum mechanics", is covered in most elementary textbooks on quantum mechanics. For a discussion of conceptual aspects, see: Expectation value (quantum mechanics) In quantum mechanics, the expectation value is the probabilistic expected value of the result (measurement) of