Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, shared a meme where a cat is visible with a cigar in its mouth, a tattoo around the eye like Mike Tyson’s, and tattoos on the hand visible, with the text – “tell Schrodinger that I survived”. 

The meme was shared on a Quora group called S&M Geeks (Science & Maths Geeks) a year back. 

Schrodinger’s cat is an experiment where the titular scientist kept a cat in a box, to come to the conclusion that until the box was opened, the cat could either be dead or alive. It is a thought experiment showing a paradox of quantum superimposition. 

Musk has studied quantum mechanics and would be aware of this experiment. In April 2019, the world’s richest man tweeted, “Quantum mechanics was harder than all my other courses combined but so incredible” and, at the time, the 51-year-old shared that they had three pets – a big dog called Gatsby, a little one called Marvin the Martian, and a cat named Schrodinger. 

The innovator also shared an image of his pets but has deleted it since then. “That’s them! Schrödinger is neither here nor there”, Musk had said at that time. 

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Musk noted at the time that any observation on Schrodinger changes Schrodinger, and added, “Schrödinger is a probability distribution in the shape of a cat”. 

Erwin Schrodinger, the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian-Irish scientist, came up with the experiment while in a discussion with Albert Einstein. He was attempting to demonstrate the problems of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. This refers to the interpretation linked primarily to Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. 

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Schrodinger initially meant the thought experiment to be a discussion of the Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) particle, which shows how quantum superimpositions are counterintuitive. It refers to how an atom or photon might exist in a combination of multiple states, based on the various possible outcomes.