Schrödinger’s code

Probably all of us heard of the Schrödinger’s cat experiment (which sometimes people refer to as a “paradox”). People tried to apply this understanding in various concepts, thus meme-fying it. Developers from all over the world didn’t stay away and attempted to apply this concept into coding too. And that’s how one can ask is there a thing such as Schrodinger’s code?

Let’s first try to understand what is Schrödinger’s cat experiment is about. Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, devised by Austrian-Irish physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, during the discussions with Albert Einstein. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The scenario presents a hypothetical cat that may be simultaneously both alive and dead, a state known as a quantum superposition, as a result of being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur.

So, a cat in the box with radio-active fluids is both dead and alive until proven so. Yet, what people call Schrödinger’s Cat experiment is actually only partially correct. While Schrodinger did have the thought experiment about a cat in a box with radioactive material and poison but he didn’t state that it is both alive and dead at the same time!

Quote from an article:

While many people incorrectly assume Schrödinger supported the premise behind the thought experiment, he really didn’t. His entire point was that it was impossible.

So, the question if Schrödinger’s cat experiment could be applied in programming should be re-interpreted as:

Is Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics possible in programming? And the answer is — yes. From my research, it’s not only possible in one coding piece, but also whole Object Oriented Programming understanding.

Before showing the examples, I would also like to source this article where they prove that Schrödinger’s cat is actually both dead and alive.

Let’s show some examples, shall we?

1st example would just simple boolean check function.

Here, until the computer returns a value we are not sure whether it will return True or False, so IF we were to use the quantum model here, we would say it is both yet none. Of course, this would not be advisable and actually senseless but yes we can assume that just like how Schrödinger did with the cat. One must keep the understanding of even and odd out of their minds so we don’t know what the output is.

2nd example is this paper from 1997 where they apply Object-Oriented concepts to Schrödinger’s experiment and see whether it could be considered as one. Shortly, an object is both “dead-and-alive” or “true-and-false” until the object is called.

3rd and last example of this blog would be a developer’s attempt to write a code that’s in a disordered and architecturally inaccurate fashion. While software engineers are coding furiously their code is like the cat in the box: it might be perfectly bug-free or it might be a complete mess. Until they build it and run a full suite of tests against it, they will have absolutely no idea which state it’s in. If an engineer is disciplined enough to write their tests first, they will see the box open the moment that their tests pass, and their code will no longer be in that unknown state.

One may even doubt if the mentioned cat ever existed, but that’s too philosophical for this blog.

If you are interested in Physics and quantum science you can read this paper where they apply the Python program to solve Schrödinger’s equation.