Schrödinger's Snail
In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger devised a famous thought experiment to illustrate the strange world of quantum mechanics that became known as Schrödinger's Cat - a cat is placed in a sealed box with a radioactive particle which would result in the death of the cat if the particle decayed. It is a little-known fact that his original thought experiment used a snail, (he didn't like snails as they ate his hostas), but he decided that a cat would get more sympathy for its apparent predicament inside the closed box, existing in the quantum sense as both alive and dead until the state of the cat can be observed when the box is opened.
In this image, the little snail is thoroughly fed up with having its fate determined by the random decay of a radioactive particle, so it makes an escape at night (when it can't be observed), and spots an error in the derivation of Schrödinger's wave equation (although the snail is a little uncertain about this).
For Macro Mondays theme 'Open'. The equations were used as a backdrop for the tiny box reflected in a sheet of Perspex. The snail's shell was 1cm in length and the image was cropped to span just under 7cm.
No snails were harmed or not harmed in the making of this photograph.
Schrödinger's Snail
In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger devised a famous thought experiment to illustrate the strange world of quantum mechanics that became known as Schrödinger's Cat - a cat is placed in a sealed box with a radioactive particle which would result in the death of the cat if the particle decayed. It is a little-known fact that his original thought experiment used a snail, (he didn't like snails as they ate his hostas), but he decided that a cat would get more sympathy for its apparent predicament inside the closed box, existing in the quantum sense as both alive and dead until the state of the cat can be observed when the box is opened.
In this image, the little snail is thoroughly fed up with having its fate determined by the random decay of a radioactive particle, so it makes an escape at night (when it can't be observed), and spots an error in the derivation of Schrödinger's wave equation (although the snail is a little uncertain about this).
For Macro Mondays theme 'Open'. The equations were used as a backdrop for the tiny box reflected in a sheet of Perspex. The snail's shell was 1cm in length and the image was cropped to span just under 7cm.
No snails were harmed or not harmed in the making of this photograph.