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
P-adic quantum mechanics wave functions, in which case the problem of the probabilistic interpretation of the "p"-adic valued wave function arises. As there does not exist a suitable "p"-adic Schrödinger equation, path integrals are employed instead. Some one-dimensional systems have been studied by means of the path integral formulation, including the free particle, the particle in a constant field, and the harmonic oscillator. P-adic quantum mechanics p"-adic quantum mechanics is a collection of related research efforts in quantum physics that replace real numbers with "p"-adic numbers. Historically, this research was inspired by the discovery that the Veneziano amplitude of the open bosonic string,