Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A woman asks why we need quantum mechanics interpretations — why can't we just accept the observed phenomena as the nature of the universe? Her companion says it is because of justice. He walks through several quantum interpretations using Schrodinger's cat. In the Copenhagen/wavefunction collapse interpretation, the cat was alive and dead, so opening the box and finding a dead cat makes you only half guilty of catslaughter. In the Many Worlds interpretation, you caused a split in reality, so you are 100% guilty of catslaughter but an alternate version of you gets a live cat. In the Hidden Variables interpretation, something else happened to kill the cat before you opened the box, so you are off the hook. He concludes: "I never realized how much of physics could be explained via cat-justice." She responds: "It's the Rosetta Stone for physics, really."

The Humor

The comic takes the notoriously abstract and difficult-to-grasp quantum mechanics interpretations and reframes them entirely through the lens of criminal liability for killing Schrodinger's cat. Each interpretation is explained not by its implications for physics but by its legal consequences for the person who opened the box. This is absurd because the interpretations of quantum mechanics were never meant to address questions of moral or legal responsibility — they are about the fundamental nature of reality. By filtering them through "cat-justice," the comic makes the interpretations surprisingly intuitive while simultaneously mocking the fact that physicists have spent decades debating something that, from a practical standpoint, makes no difference. The joke also plays on the well-known concern that the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment seems to involve animal cruelty.

References

• Schrodinger's cat is a famous thought experiment proposed by Erwin Schrodinger in 1935 to illustrate the apparent absurdity of quantum superposition.
• The Copenhagen interpretation, Many Worlds interpretation, and Hidden Variables interpretation are real frameworks for understanding quantum mechanics, each with different implications for the nature of measurement and reality.