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) general case, its spectrum will neither be entirely discrete nor entirely continuous. Still, one can write formula_1 in a spectral decomposition, with a projector-valued measure formula_30. For the expectation value of formula_1 in a pure state formula_48, this means which may be seen as a common generalization of formulas (2) and (4) above. In non-relativistic theories of finitely many particles (quantum mechanics, in the strict sense), the states considered are generally normal. However, in other areas of quantum theory, also non-normal states are in use: They appear, for example. in the form of KMS states in quantum statistical mechanics of