Schrodinger's Meaning

Send us Fan Mail Schrodinger's Cat is a thought experiment which is meant to illustrate some of the absurdity of what is happening with Quantum Mechanics. In the thought experiment the life of a cat is directly related to the state of a particle. Quantum Mechanics says that without observing the state of the particle it could be in either state. Erwin Schrodinger was attempting to show how ridiculous this was by attaching the particle state to a mechanism inside a box which would kill a cat trapped inside. The state of the particle then would have a non-quantum event that was consequential and non-reversible. The cat obviously could not be both dead and alive at the same time and therefore we should question why we think that a particle might be in two separate states simultaneously. This experiment works fine for an attempt to understand one of the many nonintuitive findings in Quantum Mechanics but we often use the story of Schrodinger's Cat in other contexts when something has contradictory states. This episode is about Schrodinger's Meaning. Some people attempt willfully to obtain two separate (and often opposite) meanings from the things they say. This goes beyond simple double entendre and into fully realized and conflicting narratives which cannot coexist or both be correct at the same time. Links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat https://www.npr.org/2021/04/26/990274685/how-extremists-weaponize-irony-to-spread-hate