Will Thomas: New at Nautilus: Bob Crease, "How Schrödinger’s Cat Got Famous" --I had no idea about LeGuin's role here

New at Nautilus: Bob Crease, "How Schrödinger’s Cat Got Famous" --I had no idea about LeGuin's role here

How Schrödinger’s Cat Got Famousnautil.us Fifty years ago, science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin popularized physics’ most enigmatic feline.

It is preposterous to think that a story in UNIVERSE 5 contributed to a steep growth in the frequency of the feline's mentions. I am reasonably expert in science fiction and a reasonably cautious, I hope, enthusiast of Google Ngram Viewer. I'd like to know how other explanations were ruled out.

Crease's source is Steven French's recent book A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH TO QUANTUM MECHANICS. I have determined that the discussion of Schrödinger's cat and N-grams begins on page 101. Does your AIP library have this book? 😉

We don't! I'll pass the word along. As long as we're on the propagation of scientific ideas into pop culture, I've recently been wondering where Joni Mitchell would have likely gotten "we are stardust ... we are billion-year-old carbon" from in 1969. Ideas?

Ask her? Beyond that, I don’t have good ideas that you haven’t already thought of…

Ha, I see this isn't the first time this has come up! www.vaticanobservatory.org/sacred-space...

Such Stuff As Stars Are Made on - Vatican Observatorywww.vaticanobservatory.org Brother Guy knows I love a challenge. A few days ago Brenda Frye, in her article on the creation of complex nuclei in supernovae, concluded “As Carl...

I has pretty much forgotten I’d written this! I should go back and re-read all the stuff I wrote for the Vatican Observatory Foundation. And maybe write some more…

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