Schrödinger's cat in popular culture 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 a humorous vein. Several have taken the thought experiment a
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