Even as a thought experiment, the test that Erwin Schrödinger proposed in 1935 was otherworldly: allowing a cat to be dead and alive at the same time in a container. Nobody was waiting for that.
The Austrian Schrödinger, a theoretical physicist by profession, corresponded around 1935 with the German Albert Einstein, also a theoretical physicist, about the question of how modern quantum mechanics related to observable reality. Many results of quantum mechanics were counterintuitive, to say the least.
Schrödinger had come up with a setup that could show this extra well. In a fictitious radiation-proof steel box he brought a fictional cat along with a pinch of radioactive material from which perhaps one atomic nucleus would decay during the experiment, but perhaps not. But if a nucleus were to decay, it would be registered by a Geiger counter, which would then deliver enough current to electrically crush an ampoule of poisonous hydrocyanic acid. That was all in the cat’s box.
The joke was that, according to the unfathomable insights of quantum mechanics, the states of decay and non-decay can exist at the same time, so that you could say that the cat in the coffin was and was not killed at the same time. Of course, if you unscrewed the coffin, she turned out to be either dead or alive.
Schrödinger had poison gas in mind
Einstein, not much of a quantum person himself, later believed that Schrödinger had proposed an explosive to kill the cat, but that was nonsense, it would have ruined the observation. Schrödinger had poison gas in mind. Furthermore, Einstein thought that the experiment showed quite nicely how you, as an honest quantum physicist, could encounter reality that actually existed.
The outsider gains no special insight from the commotion and is mainly reminded of muffled meowing and invisible stumbling. He thought of a cockroach, he thinks.
The cats that American psychologist Edward Thorndike examined in his famous ‘puzzle boxes’ were able to hear better. Thorndike is according to Wikipedia the first scientist to investigate animal psychology to learn more about humans. The fact that the Russian Ivan Pavlov did the same probably doesn’t count because he was not a psychologist.
Around 1895, Thorndike, as he put it, investigated the intelligence and stupidity of animals, especially cats. He put an end to the statement that cats move on insight arrive at the behavior that often looks so smart. They don’t reason at all, Thorndike said, but they use a system of trial-and-error. He showed it.
Thorndike placed slightly starved cats in half-open wooden boxes from which they could only escape outside if they pressed a pedal or lever or pulled a special loop. They then opened a door after which food became available. Knew the puzzle boxes different versions.
The cat that ended up in such a box for the first time immediately started a ferocious fight with its cage that could last up to five minutes. Sooner or later such a pedal or lever was hit and freedom and food came within reach. In a subsequent experiment, the cat often seemed to have a vague memory of the location and was able to open the door sooner. And so forth. In the end, such a pedal was pressed immediately upon arrival.
Thorndike didn’t like cats at all
It is remarkable, wrote Thorndike in Sciencethat fellow cats who had been able to follow developments closely did not learn anything from it at all. If they were put in the same box later, it initially took them more than five minutes to get out again. Learning by imitation does not exist in cats.
Thus, 130 years later, the suspicion arises that Thorndike had no cats at home. Every cat lover knows that cats not only imitate each other but also people. See them press the door handle and open the refrigerator. Thorndike didn’t like cats at all.
It is certain that people loved Laika, the third caged animal we encounter today. Laika was the first dog to fly around the Earth, in November 1957 she was carried beyond the atmosphere on Sputnik 2. There she had to prepare the way for Yuri Gagarin who would follow her in 1961. No one knew exactly what the acceleration, weightlessness and unattenuated cosmic and solar radiation could do.
Laika was a mixed-breed street dog and would therefore be extra resistant to hardship. Her cosmonaut training involved learning to get used to increasingly cramped housing. In Sputnik 2, she was fitted with a leather harness and a rubber bag around her abdomen, attached to chains that barely allowed her to sit or lie down. There were sensors for measuring heart rate, breathing and blood pressure.
Laika would make a journey of seven days and not return to earth, everyone knew that. One researcher therefore took her home for a while to play with his children and hoped to make amends. When her capsule was sealed she received a kiss on the nose.
Laika’s journey lasted only a short time. Heart rate and blood pressure increased and her breathing showed that she barked a lot. She died within a few hours due to her capsule overheating, something had gone wrong. The West was first led to believe that Laika would return by parachute and later that she would die a gentle death from poison in her last meal. In reality, nothing was planned for the end at all: Laika’s life would stop as soon as the oxygen ran out.
It’s all in there a beautiful Wikipedia entryincluding a belated comment from researcher Oleg Gazenko: “We should never have done it.”