Erwin Schrödinger, one of the founders of quantum theory, introduced his thought experiment that involves the poor animal in his 1935 paper “The present situation in quantum mechanics”1. According to the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics, a cat locked in a chamber with a radioactive material that can trigger a killing poison would be in “neither alive nor dead state” until someone “looks” inside, in order to check. This “neither alive nor dead state” is, according to the orthodox quantum theory, a “superposition” of “cat alive” and “cat dead” states.
Then Schrödinger focuses on “knowledge”, on “what do I know”, instead of focusing on what “objectively happens”. That is why he got himself into a “paradox”, and his paradox has been examined again and again in hundreds if not thousands of papers and books by physicists and by philosophers ever since. A typical conclusion is that reached by John Gribbin in his book “In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat”2: “there is no underlying reality to the world.”
The Reality of Superselection
Again we seem to be dealing with a typical example of compartmentalized thinking that is so typical for authoritarians. John Gribbin is an astrophysicist and certainly he has studied the subject before writing about it. So, Gribbin must have known the term “superselection rules”, introduced by Wick, Wightman and Wigner in their 1952, and 1970 papers34.
In 1974 Strocchi and Wightman gave a rigorous proof of “charge superselection rules”, which means that two states of any system that carries different electric charges are “classically different”, that is, performing “quantum superpositions” of such states is meaningless. It would be rather strange if “cat alive” and cat “dead” had exactly the same electric charge, up to one electron! But John Gribbin evidently did not think about that. His thinking was probably compartmentalized and certain facts - those that would contradict some of the authorities he followed - have been put into a non-active part of his mind, if not ignored entirely.
1Reprinted in W. Zurek et al, Quantum Theory and Measurement”, Princeton University Press, 1983
2John Gribbin, “In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat”, Bantam Books, 1984
3Wick, G. C., Wightman, A. S., & Wigner, E. P. (1952). The intrinsic parity of elementary particles. Physical Review, 88, 101-105.
4Wick, G. C., Wightman, A. S., & Wigner, E. P. (1970). Superselection rule for charge. Physical Review D, 1, 3267-3269
P.S.1.My wife likes this... so this is for her. Very REAL.
