Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic is a joke about Erwin Schrodinger's famous thought experiment, "Schrodinger's Cat," in which a cat inside a sealed box exists in a quantum superposition of being both alive and dead until observed. A police officer is arresting a man (drawn to resemble Schrodinger) for animal abuse, presumably for the treatment of the cat in the experiment. Schrodinger protests that he can't be arrested because he is "in a superposition of innocent and guilty," cleverly applying the same quantum mechanics logic to his own legal status.

The caption reads "Fortunately, Erwin Schrodinger was not an experimentalist," which adds another layer to the joke. In real life, Schrodinger was indeed a theoretical physicist, not an experimentalist -- he devised the thought experiment purely to illustrate what he saw as the absurdity of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The joke implies that if he had actually been an experimentalist, he might have literally performed the experiment on a real cat and genuinely faced animal cruelty charges.