The Coming of the Quantum Cats can - given different social conditions - develop completely different character traits (timid or assertive, benevolent or predatory, etc.) The title refers to the famous thought-experiment known as "Schrödinger's Cat", where the outcome of a real-world event depends on a quantum event. By some interpretations, the real-world object, in this case a cat, must be in two states simultaneously until it is observed. However, the story is more closely related to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics where all possible outcomes of an event occur, each in its own parallel universe. The same concept was treated, somewhat more pessimistically, in
Expectation value (quantum mechanics) Expectation value (quantum mechanics) In quantum mechanics, the expectation value is the probabilistic expected value of the result (measurement) of an experiment. It can be thought of as an average of all the possible outcomes of a measurement as weighted by their likelihood, and as such it is not the "most" probable value of a measurement; indeed the expectation value may have zero probability of occurring (e.g. measurements which can only yield integer values may have a non-integer mean). It is a fundamental concept in all areas of quantum physics. Consider an operator formula_1. The expectation value is then formula_2