Art Memes

The infamous Schrödinger's cat experiment meets surrealist art! The meme brilliantly mashes up quantum physics with René Magritte's famous painting "The Treachery of Images" (you know, the pipe with "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" underneath). In quantum mechanics, Schrödinger proposed his famous thought experiment where a cat in a box with a radioactive trigger is simultaneously alive and dead until observed. Here we see the cat both transparent (dead) and solid (alive) with the radioactive material and trigger mechanism nearby. The French phrase "Ceci n'est pas une dead or alive" (This is not a dead or alive) is the perfect punchline - because quantum superposition means it's literally both states at once until measured. It's quantum physics making fun of itself!