Sep 05, 2026 15:01 pm IST

Blog | Why You Should Care Whether Schrodinger's Cat Is Dead Or Alive

Imagine going on a romantic Alpine getaway and returning with the equation that runs the modern world. The only snag: nobody can quite agree on what it says about reality.

Shashi Tharoor Shashi Tharoor MP, Columnist

Shashi Tharoor MP, Columnist

Fun fact: did you realise that you are living through the centenary year of Schrodinger's famous theory?

Come again? Never heard of it? Wait a minute - I'll tell you all you need to know. And it's quite a story.

In the winter of 1925, an Austrian physicist named Erwin Schrodinger ran off to a secluded villa in the Swiss Alps for a romantic getaway. He brought along his ski gear, two pearls to plug his ears against unwanted noise, and an undisclosed mistress. By the time he descended from the mountain in early 1926, he had written down an equation that would change the world forever.

It was a line of mathematical poetry so wildly successful that it birthed modern technology, powering everything from silicon microprocessors to medical MRIs, lasers, and quantum computers. Yet, a century later, it remains one of the single biggest mysteries in human intellectual history.

Schrodinger gave us the ultimate recipe for predicting reality, but left behind a cosmic prank: as far as I can tell, nobody actually knows what his equation is telling us about what reality truly is.

Before Schrodinger, The Physics That Made Sense

To appreciate the madness, we first have to look at what physics looked like before Erwin Schrodinger's Alpine vacation. Isaac Newton had given us a delightfully sensible universe where things exist in specific places, move in predictable paths, and stay put unless you push them. If you throw a stone from a mountain-top, classical physics tells you exactly where it will land. That's gravity, and it's been around forever.

Literally so, if you're Indian. The Rig Veda understood it 3,000 years before Newton; the Vaisheshika Sutra (6th to 2nd century BC) described objects falling to the ground because of the property of 'gurutva'; and the Surya Siddhanta (4th-5th century CE) describes gravity as Dharanatmika Shakti, under which the Earth attracts objects towards it centre like a magnet draws iron.........

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