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
Measurement in quantum mechanics the change in state following measurement. There are many philosophical issues and stances (and some mathematical variations) taken—and near universal agreement that we do not yet fully understand quantum reality. In any case, our descriptions of dynamics involve probabilities, not certainties. The mathematical relationship between the quantum state and the probability distribution is, again, widely accepted among physicists, and has been experimentally confirmed countless times. This section summarizes this relationship, which is stated in terms of the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. It is a postulate of quantum mechanics that all measurements have an associated operator (called an observable operator,