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The Philosopher's Shirt

The Return of Schroedinger's Cat

Schrödinger published his cat in 1935 to argue that quantum superposition makes no sense for anything larger than an atom. Ninety years later, the cat is more famous than the argument. This collection brings it back as a creature feature: a horror poster sequel where the experiment went wrong and the cat came back changed. T-shirts, hoodies, sweatshirts, mugs and stickers for physicists, students, teachers and horror fans.

Questions about this design

What does The Return of Schroedinger's Cat design show?
A vintage horror-movie poster – a giant cat whose face is split down the middle, one half a living tabby with a yellow eye, the other a blue, skull-faced undead version with fangs. Below it the title in retro lettering, a screaming heroine and a moonlit graveyard. The cat that was both alive and dead is back, and it is not happy about the box.
What is Schrödinger's cat?
A thought experiment published by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. A cat is sealed in a steel chamber with a tiny radioactive sample, a Geiger counter, a hammer and a flask of poison. If an atom decays, the poison is released. Taken literally, quantum mechanics would describe the cat after an hour as a superposition of alive and dead until someone looks.
What was the point of Schrödinger's cat?
It was meant as criticism, not as a model. Schrödinger, who developed it in correspondence with Albert Einstein, wanted to show how absurd it is to apply the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics to everyday objects. A cat cannot sensibly be half dead – so something about the standard story of measurement must be incomplete.
Was Schrödinger's cat experiment ever performed?
No. It was purely a thought experiment, and no cat was ever put in a box. Physicists have since created so-called cat states – superpositions of larger and larger quantum systems such as trapped ions, superconducting circuits and light fields – but always with particles, never with animals.
What is quantum superposition?
The principle that a quantum system can exist in a combination of several possible states at once, described by a wave function, until it is measured. An electron can be in a superposition of spin up and spin down; a measurement then yields one definite result, with probabilities given by the wave function.
What is the Copenhagen interpretation?
The view associated with Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the 1920s that the wave function describes our knowledge of a system and that measurement produces a definite outcome, often called the collapse of the wave function. Schrödinger's cat targets exactly the vague boundary between the quantum system and the measuring apparatus.
What is the many-worlds interpretation?
Hugh Everett III's proposal from 1957 that the wave function never collapses. Instead, every measurement splits reality into branches in which each possible outcome occurs. On this view the cat is alive in one branch and dead in another, and the observer who opens the box ends up in both versions.
Who was Erwin Schrödinger?
An Austrian physicist (1887–1961) who formulated the Schrödinger equation in 1926, the central equation of wave mechanics, and shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Paul Dirac. He also wrote the influential short book What Is Life? (1944), which inspired a generation of molecular biologists.
Is The Return of Schroedinger's Cat design a good gift?
Yes, for physics and philosophy students, science teachers, cat people and fans of vintage horror posters – everyone gets a different joke. It comes as a unisex T-shirt, women's T-shirt, sweatshirt, premium hoodie, mug and sticker.