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
Symmetry in quantum mechanics act on any four vector A = ("A", "A", "A", "A") and mix the time-like and the space-like components, according to: In relativistic quantum mechanics, wavefunctions are no longer single-component scalar fields, but now 2(2"s" + 1) component spinor fields, where "s" is the spin of the particle. The transformations of these functions in spacetime are given below. Under a proper orthochronous Lorentz transformation in Minkowski space, all one-particle quantum states locally transform under some representation of the Lorentz group: where is a finite-dimensional representation, in other words a dimensional square matrix, and is thought of as a column vector