The Unadulterated Cat

Schrodinger [“And I say you must have left a window open”] Cats

All cats are now Schrodinger cats. Once you understand that, the whole cat business falls into place.

The original Schrodinger cats were the offspring of an infamous quantum mechanics experiment of the 1930s (or possibly they weren't the original ones. Possibly there were no original ones.)

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 go. Then you add a little bottle-smashing mechanism which may—or may not–smash the bottle; it all depends on random nuclear thingummies being given off by some radioactive material. This is also in the box. It is a large box. Now, according to quantum theory, the cat in the box is both a wave and a particle… hang on, no. What it is, because of all these quantums, is in a state of not actually being either alive or dead,9 but both and neither at the same time, until the observer lifts the lid and, by the act of observation, sort of fixes the cat in space/time etc. He's either looking at a candidate for the sad patch, or a spitting ball of mildly-radioactive hatred with bits of glass in it. The weird part about it is that, before the lid is lifted, not only the cat's future but also its immediate past are both undecided. It might have had been dead for five minutes, for example.

That's the story that got into the textbooks, anyway.

If you can believe it. It's like the one about one twin staying here and the other going off to Sirius at the speed of light and coming back and finding his brother is now a grandfather running a huge vegetable wholesale operation in Bradford. How does anyone know? Has anyone met them? What was it like on Sirius, anyway?

Less well known is the work by a group of scientists who failed to realise that Schrodinger was talking about a “thought experiment” 10, and did it. Box, radioactive source, bottle of poison, everything. And the cat, of course.

They left out one important consideration, though. While the observer might not know what was going on, the cat in the box damn well would. We can assume that if the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind, then the inkling that, any minute now, some guy in a white coat is going to lift the lid and there's a fifty-fifty chance that you are dead already, does wonders for the brain. Spurred by this knowledge, and perhaps by all the quantums floating around the laboratory, the cat nipped around a corner in space-time and was found, slightly bewildered, in the janitor's cupboard.

Evolution is always quick to exploit a new idea, however, and this novel way of getting out of tricky situations was soon passed on to its offspring. It had a large number of offspring.

Given its new-found talent, this is not surprising.

The important gene was so incredibly dominant that now many cats have a bit of Schrodinger in them. It is characterised by the ability to get in and out of locked boxes, such as rooms, houses, fridges, the thing you swore you put it in to take it to the vet, etc. If you threw the cat out last night, and this morning it's peacefully asleep under your bed, it's a Schrodinger cat.

There is a school of thought which says there is in fact a sort of negative Schrodinger gene.

Whereas your full-blown Schrodinger can get in and out of the most unusual places there are cats, it has been pointed out, that would find it difficult to get out of a hoop with both ends open. These are the cats that you normally see, or rather, you normally hear behind fridges, in those dead little areas behind kitchen storage units, in locked garages and, in one case known to us, inside the walls (dreadful Edgar Allan Poetic visions led to a hole being knocked into the cavity a little way from the noise, which of course caused the cat—definitely a Real cat—to retreat further from the noise; it came out 24 hours later, dragged by the scent of a plate of food). But we are inclined to believe that this is not so and that these are merely examples of Offside (see “Games cats play”).

However, this ability, which most Real cats' owners will have noticed (and what about when they're missing for a couple of days, eh, and come back well fed? Have they just been panhandling round the neighbours, or did they nip along to next Wednesday to enjoy the huge relieved “welcome-back” meal you gave them?), leads on to interesting speculation about: