SATIN ISLAND (TOM MCCARTHY), COHERENCE AND SCHRÖDINGER´S CAT

 It’s a well-known problem for the anthropologist, first noted by a man named Landsberger: the tribe under observation are aware they’re being observed, and alter their behaviour in view of this fact, often acting out versions of themselves which they think conform to the ethnographer’s own conceptions of them. The technical term for this phenomenon is the Hawthorne effect; but in college we always called it the Cat-in-a-Box Paradox. Our nickname owed its title to the famous hypothesis devised by Erwin Schrödinger, to illustrate the logical consequences of Einstein’s discoveries about the weird behaviour of atoms (we were, in fact, slightly confusing two separate scientific theorems — the Hawthorne effect doesn’t actually have much to do with Schrödinger’s hypothesis; but, not being quantum physicists, we didn’t know or care). Were you (Schrödinger proposed) to seal a cat inside a box in which a vial of gaseous poison — cyanide, say — would either break, thereby killing the cat, or remain intact, thereby leaving it unharmed, depending on which of two apertures an atom chose to jump through — well, the atom would only choose to have jumped through one hole or the other at the moment when the scientist opened up the box to see which it had already jumped through. In other words, the cat would be neither alive nor dead, or rather, both alive and dead, until the scientist, post hoc, peered in to ascertain its live- or deadness.

If you try very strongly to get away from the cliches, sometimes you omit important facts. Schrödinger´s Cat is a classic. People use and abuse of this concept and, frequently, in a wrong way. As the text says, two physicist conepts are mixed, but it also says that Einstein was the author of quantum theory when he tried to deny it with the famous sentence 'God doesn´t play dice'
We haven´t talked about the Cat in the Box until the post number 155; to compensate it, we offer a scene from Coherence (a good film, by the way) about the topic.