Leave it to beaver

On second thought, anybody who's needed to get a cat into a pet carrier knows the unlikelihood of a cat going to sleep inside a darkened box.  Not to mention the unlikelihood of even getting the cat in the box.  The cat would more probably knock over the intended experimental equipment and yowl until you let him or her out.  And who could blame 'em?  Was old uncle Erwin--old (40s) compared to Heisenberg and Dirac (20s)--making a subtle joke by suggesting doing the experiment with a cat?  Was he thinking that since the mouse is usually the poor creature who gets inhumanely put in a humanly concocted experiment that he'd use it's opposite, a cat?  Or was there a cat asleep on his desk when he thought up the experiment?

Whatever the case may be, the next 1967 calendar animal I put words in the mouth of was a beaver:

No, I wasn't very good at spelling as a 12 and 13 year old kid.   I got better.

Sleeping cat?

In 1998, when I was taking an undergraduate quantum physics class taught by Steven Weinberg at UT-Austin (a rare thing for him to teach an undergrad course--he gave us only homework sets and no exams, which I very much liked), the book for the course was Intro to Quantum Mechanics, by David J. Griffiths.  Yep, the one I mentioned earlier, with a drawing of a live cat on the front and a dead cat on the back.  When the 10-year-old daughter of my girlfriend at the time saw the book she called the cat on the back a "sleeping cat."  I told her that it was actually supposed to be a dead cat, according to the Schrodinger thought experiment that was represented by the two drawings.

Now I'm thinking why not let the cat have a 50% chance of being awake or asleep? Have the experiment use a sleeping potion released in the sealed box with the cat instead of cyanide gas.

Well, the problem with that is the cat could enter this state, the state of being asleep, independently of what the experimental apparatus does.  Who could blame the cat in a dark closed box for going to sleep?  But this possibility would mess up the 2-state probability transferance from atomic system (metastable quantum state) to the cat.

But, on the other hand, the cat could also enter the state of being dead independently!  If you put it in a sealed box, it's not gonna live too long without air being pumped in! Or it could have a heart attack or whatever, and this possibility is ignored by usual discussions of the "cat paradox."

So when I get around to actually discussing the significance of Schrodinger's cat, I'll use a sleeping cat versus an awake cat and see how that works out...

Three semesters after I took the Weinberg quantum course, I took yet another undergraduate quantum mechanics class, this time at the University of South Carolina, and it even used the same book.  However, it was a traditional class. Exams, including a final exam, were given.  I'd made an "A" in Weinberg's difficult-homework-based class.  Using the same book in a standard homework-and-exam-based class a year and a half later--with actually a very good teacher (Weinberg was okay, but taught like he was giving one of his research seminars--lecturing, with little if any class participation encouraged)--I made a "B".