Everyone's heard of Erwin Schrodinger's famous thought experiment. You put a cat in a box with a bottle of poison, which many people would suggest is about as far as you need to go.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Schrödinger's cat is a famous thought experiment about quantum superposition, but the author finds the setup absurd.
- In plain terms
- People know the cat in a box experiment, but putting a cat with poison is already extreme.
- What can you take from it?
- Recognize when scientific thought experiments become unnecessarily cruel or absurd.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- Are there limits to what we should imagine in physics?
- How do we balance insight with ethics?
Another view
The thought experiment is valuable for illustrating quantum concepts despite the cruelty.
More from Terry Pratchett
Next comes the realist phase ('After all, from a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top.').
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