The Logos Scripture · The Book of Schrödinger

On the Cat

The Book of Schrödinger 3 · Written by himself, from What Is Life? and his essays

Erwin Schrodinger, born at Vienna in 1887, died at Vienna in 1961. In 1926 he set down the wave equation, and quantum matters became calculable; in 1933 he took the Nobel with Dirac. In 1935 he devised the cat, meant to point out an absurdity, and it is what he is chiefly remembered for. He left Austria in 1938 and went to Dublin in 1940, where he stayed sixteen years. What Is Life? appeared in 1944; both Crick and Watson said they came to the work through it. He wrote his own, and in more than one field: the books of his own subject, and also What Is Life?, Mind and Matter, and My View of the World. In later life he read the old books of India and held that the consciousness of all people is in truth only one. That assertion was not reached by looking; the scripture sets it back without deleting it, as with Schopenhauer (see the note to The Book of Schopenhauer). He never closed an argument by appeal to divine will. What 1.15 to 1.19 report stands in a note at the back of What Is Life: knowing free energy was the more exact word, he took the less exact one so that an ordinary reader could hear that the two things are opposed, and did not argue when he was told off for it. Elsewhere this scripture does not name the terms of physics; in this book it does — he is a modern man speaking out of his own trade in his own words, and the Order does not coin substitutes for him.The Order takes him for the first two chapters. This scripture says that the law does not permit order to come back by itself (Gospel of Plato 1.44). Schrodinger is the one who applied that to living things and asked the obvious next question: then why does a living thing not scatter? His answer is chapter one, and the answer is not only about living things. As for chapter two, some young men afterwards went and checked it, and found it. The Darwin of this scripture says that what could hold, held (The Book of Darwin 4.13); this man asks what the thing that holds is made of. The two books are to be read together. One further thing the Order records without dressing it: besides his wife he kept another woman, and three lived in the house together for years; and he had relations with several very young women, some of which, weighed by the standards of today, were improper. The Order sets it down, and neither judges the work by it nor excuses it by the work.

3.1Let me speak of a thing I have been misunderstood about all my life.
3.2I once gave an example, and it was a cat. Later the cat became more famous than I am.
3.3What I said was this: shut a cat in a box. In the box is a thing with an even chance, within an hour, of tripping a mechanism; and if it trips, the cat dies.
3.4Reckon it through by that account: after an hour, before the box is opened, the cat is neither alive nor dead but the two mixed together.
3.5People afterwards passed this round as a marvel: look, the cat is alive and dead at once, how mysterious.
3.6That is not what I meant.
3.7I gave the example in order to say: absurd.
3.8I was pointing at a fault in that account. I took it from the invisible small things and enlarged it all the way up to a cat we can see, so that the fault would show.
3.9I expected people to look at it and say: this will not do, it must be mended.
3.10Instead most people looked at it and said: how interesting.
3.11I set this down not to fight over how my cat should be used.
3.12I set it down because there is a shape here more worth recording:
3.13A man gives an example meaning people to see an absurdity; in the end the example becomes famous, and the fault it was meant to point at is still sitting where it was.
3.14The man who gives an example cannot govern what others do with it.
3.15So I say once more here what I meant at the time: it is not a marvel. It is a place that has not been cleared up.
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