In a 1986 book called The Shaky Game, the author, Arthur Fine, talks about what he calls "Einstein, Realism and the Quantum Theory." Chapter Five of the book is "Schrödinger’s Cat and Einstein's: The Genesis of a Paradox." The chapter includes quotes from correspondence between Einstein and Schrödinger during the summer of 1935, just after the controversial Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper ("Can quantum mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?") had been published and just before the Schrödinger cat paper (Die gegenwartige Situation in der Quantenmechanik*) was published. Professor Fine (of the philosophy department at Northwestern University) included this quote from the Schrödinger's cat paper:
"One can even make up quite ludicrous examples. A cat is enclosed in a steel chamber, together with the following infernal machine (which one must secure against the cat’s direct reach): in a tube of a Geigercounter there is a tiny amount of radioactive material, so small that although one of its atoms might decay in the course of an hour, it is just as probable that none will. If decay occurs the counter tube fires and, by means of a relay, sets a little hammer into motion that shatters a small bottle prussic acid. When the entire system has been left alone for an hour one would say that the cat is still alive provided no atom has decayed in the meantime. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it. TheΨ-function of the total system would yield an expression for all this in which, in equal measure, the living and the dead cat are (sit venia verbo**) blended or smeared out.
The characteristic of these examples is that an indefiniteness originally limited to atomic dimensions gets transformed into gross macroscopic indefiniteness, which can then be reduced by direct observation. This prevents us from continuing naively to give credence to a “fuzzy model” as a picture of reality."
After giving that description, says Fine, "Schrödinger finishes by observing, 'In itself this [fuzzy model] contains nothing unclear or contradictory.' For, he notes, 'There is a difference between a blurred or out-of-focus picture and a photograph of clouds and patches of fog.'"
For me it's all just patches of fog at the moment, and I couldn't really say if that's because the picture is out of focus or it's a photo of patches of fog, y'know? I mean, when the great Schrödinger says "This prevents us ..." yada yada, what is meant by "this"? Then there's the later "this" that Fine parenthetically says is the "[fuzzy model]". Fuzzy wuzzy was a worm...or a bear?
*"The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics"
**"pardon the expression"
