Conceptual Science

I once had a cat called Schrödinger. At the time, I thought it was a clever name—a humorous nod to the famous thought experiment. But in hindsight, it was a terrible choice. When the cat passed away unexpectedly, the irony of his name was painfully apparent. Everyone laughed. Schrödinger, my cat, was no longer with us, and with him, the joke was no longer funny. And that’s the strange thing about Schrödinger’s cat—it was never just a simple joke, but a profound puzzle about the nature of reality itself. The original cat, of course, wasn’t real, but the scientist who gave rise to the thought experiment certainly was. Erwin Schrödinger, the Austrian physicist, was one of the central figures in the development of quantum mechanics. In the 1920s, Schrödinger, along with his peers, formulated equations that uncovered the strange and puzzling world of the very small—equations that have since become the bedrock of modern science. These equations didn’t merely describe a niche corner of scienc...

  Def. I. The Quantity of Matter is the measure of the same, arising from its density and bulk conjunctly. THUS AIR of a double density, in a double space, is quadruple in quantity; in a triple space, sextuple in quantity. The same thing is to be understood of snow, and fine dust or powders, that are condensed by compression or liquefaction; and of all bodies that are by any causes whatever differently condensed. I have no regard in this place to a medium, if any such there is, that freely pervades the interstices between the parts of bodies. It is this quantity that I mean hereafter everywhere under the name of Body or Mass. And the same is known by the weight of each body, for it is proportional to the weight, as I have found by experiments on pendulums, very accurately made, which shall be shewn hereafter.   The quantity of matter is the measure of the same, arising from its density and bulk conjunctly. The first definition pertains to the “quantity of matter”, thus promp...