Schrödinger's cat Schrödinger's cat Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment, sometimes 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 scenario presents a cat that may be simultaneously both alive and dead, a state known as a quantum superposition, as a result of being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur. The thought experiment is also often featured in theoretical discussions of the interpretations of quantum mechanics. Schrödinger coined the term "Verschränkung" (entanglement) in
Quantum mechanics final states. This is the quantum-mechanical counterpart of the action principle in classical mechanics. The rules of quantum mechanics are fundamental. They assert that the state space of a system is a Hilbert space (crucially, that the space has an inner product) and that observables of that system are Hermitian operators acting on vectors in that space—although they do not tell us which Hilbert space or which operators. These can be chosen appropriately in order to obtain a quantitative description of a quantum system. An important guide for making these choices is the correspondence principle, which states that the predictions