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
Quantum statistical mechanics Quantum statistical mechanics Quantum statistical mechanics is statistical mechanics applied to quantum mechanical systems. In quantum mechanics a statistical ensemble (probability distribution over possible quantum states) is described by a density operator "S", which is a non-negative, self-adjoint, trace-class operator of trace 1 on the Hilbert space "H" describing the quantum system. This can be shown under various mathematical formalisms for quantum mechanics. One such formalism is provided by quantum logic. From classical probability theory, we know that the expectation of a random variable "X" is defined by its distribution D by assuming, of course, that the random variable is