November 1, 1935: Erwin Schrödinger Kills a Cat (And Doesn't)

November 1, 1935: Erwin Schrödinger mocks his contemporaries. Only, he is taken seriously. Which is somewhat appropriate, given the nature of what he was trying to say.

The November 1935 issue of the German magazine Naturwissenschaften (The Science of Nature) published a paper that he wrote, titled "The Current Situation in Quantum Mechanics." He was questioning the concept of superposition, which is basically when a particle is in two places at once and only "chooses" where to be under duress of measurement.

In response, he developed the "Cat Paradox," which was supposed to illustrate what Schrödinger regarded as a flaw in the theory, in the most ridiculous way possible. He suggested that a hypothetical cat may be considered simultaneously both alive and dead, while it is unobserved in a closed box, as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur.

Schrödinger may have meant it as a joke. But physicists have taken it seriously, as a challenge. They've gathered increasingly large groups of atoms in different places at the same time, simulated the experiment with something called "qubits" and "optical tweezers," and even built predictive models to save the cat. At last check, they have not yet crossed the line by trapping a real cat and gassing it.

Want to hear something stupid? For years, I thought "Schrödinger's Cat" was the one that walked through walls, doing so simply because it didn't know that it couldn't. As it turned out, I had confused Schrödinger's Cat with the title character in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, a 1985 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein, and a tribute to Schrödinger's Cat. Whether Heinlein was aware of the novel's publication being close to the 50th Anniversary of Schrödinger's paper, or whether he cared that it was, only he knew.

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November 1, 1935 was a Friday. Born on this day were right-wing businessman Charles Koch, author Edward Said, and golfer Gary Player.

Baseball was out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the NHL season started 6 days later. But there were 3 college football games played:

* Wake Forest beat Presbyterian University, 18-0 at Gore Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

* Centenary College beat Loyola University, 9-0 at Loyola Stadium in New Orleans.

* And Mississippi (a.k.a. Ole Miss) beat Saint Louis University, 21-7 at Walsh Memorial Stadium in St. Louis.