Austrian Nobel laureate in physics, Erwin Schrödinger - Aug. 12, 1887 - 1961…
Schrödinger is best known for the thought experiment he developed after corresponding w. Einstein - Schrödinger’s Cat:
A cat, along with a flask containing a poison, is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If a Geiger counter detects radiation then the flask is shattered, releasing the poison which kills the cat. Quantum mechanics suggests that after a while the cat is simultaneously alive and dead, in a quantum superposition of coexisting alive and dead states. Yet when we look in the box we expect to see the cat either alive or dead, not a mixture of alive and dead.
Quantum mechanics thus does away with the problem of the excluded middle, by excluding both ends as well.
Schrödinger seemed in life also to want to have his cat and eat it too, living in effect in a double marriage with two women, one of whom was de jure married to his research assistant - both however, de facto, sharing in the upbringing of Schrödinger’s child…
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