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
Introduction to quantum mechanics an atom that was spun up to spin down: measuring its spin about the horizontal axis collapses its wave function into one of the eigenstates of this measurement, which means it is no longer in an eigenstate of spin about the vertical axis, so can take either value. [[File:Wolfgang Pauli young.jpg|right|thumb|upright|[[Wolfgang Pauli]]]] In 1924, [[Wolfgang Pauli]] proposed a new quantum degree of freedom (or [[quantum number]]), with two possible values, to resolve inconsistencies between observed molecular spectra and the predictions of quantum mechanics. In particular, the [[hydrogen spectrum|spectrum of atomic hydrogen]] had a [[Doublet (physics)|doublet]], or pair of lines differing