The Quantum Cat: A Campaign For Science And The Culture Of Reason – OpEd

November 12, 2025 
By K.M. Seethi

Image: From the author’s file

As the world’s technological frontiers race ahead of our collective understanding, science today stands both indispensable and contested. The twenty-first century has brought incredible progress in quantum computing, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence, even as it has witnessed a resurgence of pseudoscience, denialism, and the ideological distortion of knowledge. The real challenge before modern societies is not simply to multiply discoveries, but to safeguard the very spirit of inquiry that makes discovery possibl

In the first week of November 2025, as the United Nations marks the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ 2025), the South Indian state of Kerala has added its own creative turn to the celebration. The Centre for Science in Society (C-SiS) at the Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT) in collaboration with the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP) has launched the Quantum Cat campaign — a science exhibition and outreach movement that travels across ten districts. The exhibition opened on November 7 at CUSAT and will run through December, bringing to schools, colleges, and communities an experience of the “quantum century.”

But this is not just another science event. It gets underway at a critical moment when anti-science attitudes and pseudoscientific beliefs are gaining ground, encouraged by a political climate that seeks to rewrite knowledge through ideology. The Sangh Parivar’s attempts to dilute and distort scientific theories in curricula and promote mythical claims at official science events reflect a major crisis — the erosion of scientific temper, a constitutional duty that India once proudly upheld. Against this background, the campaign acquires crucial social meaning – it defends reason itself.

KSSP President Meera Bhai told this author that the initiative “seeks to promote science and scientific inquiry from the school level onwards,” continuing a long tradition that began with the Parishad’s legendary Halley’s Comet campaign in 1986. Then, too, KSSP fought superstition by turning fear into curiosity. Today, as irrationality resurfaces in new forms, such as astrology apps, miracle cures, WhatsApp “Vedic science,” the Quantum Cat becomes a new mascot of rational inquiry. Recent findings from Kerala Padanangal 2.0, KSSP’s statewide social survey, show that one in three people in Kerala still depend on astrology to make life decisions — a surprising figure in a state known for high literacy and human development. This coexistence of reason and belief, science and superstition, is precisely the paradox the campaign seeks to address.

The Century of Quantum Science

The International Year of Quantum Science and Technology commemorates a hundred years since the birth of quantum theory, the most successful and puzzling scientific framework ever devised. When Max Planck proposed in 1900 that energy comes in discrete “quanta,” he began a revolution. Einstein used that idea to explain light as particles, Bohr built his model of the atom, Heisenberg introduced the uncertainty principle, and Schrödinger described matter as waves. Together they showed that at the subatomic level, nature defies common sense. In the quantum world, particles exist in multiple states at once — a phenomenon called superposition — and remain mysteriously connected across vast distances through entanglement. Observation itself determines outcomes, making the observer part of reality. This radical idea — that measurement changes what is measured — has transformed every field of science.

Today, quantum principles underlie technologies that define modern life, from lasers, semiconductors, to solar cells, and GPS. They are now driving quantum computing and quantum communication, promising faster problem-solving and unbreakable data security. In chemistry and biology, quantum mechanics explains the structure of molecules, the efficiency of photosynthesis, and even how birds sense magnetic fields.

For some scientists, quantum mechanics defies classical explanation, operating in a realm where causality is uncertain and probability replaces determinism. Physicist Babu Joseph, former Vice-Chancellor of CUSAT, explains it more precisely: “The Schrödinger’s Cat captures the essence of quantum mechanics, which asserts that there is no observer-independent reality. The standard binary — exist or not — isn’t true. There can be combinations of varying degrees of possibilities until the observer interacts with the system.” That insight lies at the heart of the superposition principle, the backbone of quantum mechanics, he told this author.

Quantum science thus transforms how we see both matter and meaning. It teaches that reality is not fixed but relational, not given but discovered through interaction — a lesson as relevant to society as to physics.

The Cat in the Box: From Paradox to Possibility

Erwin Schrödinger’s famous cat was never real. Conceived in 1935, it was a thought experiment to expose the absurd implications of early quantum theory. In Schrödinger’s imaginary box, a cat’s life depends on a random atomic event. Until someone opens the box, the cat is both alive and dead — a paradox meant to question how far quantum laws can extend into the visible world.

Modern physics resolves the puzzle through decoherence: real cats interact with their environment, collapsing the ambiguity long before observation. However, the Quantum Cat survived in imagination, literature, and popular science — precisely because it dramatises the central mystery of observation and reality. It asks a timeless question: Can we know the world without changing it? For KSSP’s campaigners, this cat is a metaphor for scientific curiosity. It provokes questions — How can something be alive and dead at once? What does observation mean? — and in doing so, it invites thinking, reasoning, and dialogue.

The cat also teaches humility. It reminds us that nature does not always obey our common sense, and that our perceptions are limited. In a society where superstition often pretends as wisdom, such humility is a moral necessity. As Meera Bhai noted, “KSSP’s science campaigns have always connected wonder with reason — from Halley’s Comet to the Quantum Cat — to make people see the beauty of questioning.”

Used symbolically, Schrödinger’s cat bridges imagination and logic. It tells students that science is not dry or distant but full of wonder and paradox. It shows that curiosity and creativity belong together. And in public life, it becomes a counter-symbol — against fatalism, dogma, and blind belief.

The Quantum Imagination

Over the past century, quantum ideas have travelled far beyond the laboratory, shaping the way philosophers and social scientists think about knowledge, perception, and reality. Just as a quantum particle can exist in many states until observed, societies too can contain multiple, often contradictory realities — rational and irrational, secular and superstitious, progressive and reactionary — coexisting beneath the surface. These contradictions persist until some event, such as an election, a protest, or a crisis, forces them into view and “collapses” them into a single, visible outcome.

In this sense, Schrödinger’s Cat has become more than a symbol of physics; it is a metaphor for social life itself. People may believe in science yet rely on superstition, or support equality while practising exclusion. Sociologists have long explored such tensions. Émile Durkheim described societies as combining both mechanical and organic solidarity; Georg Simmel’s “stranger” is simultaneously near and distant; Karl Marx’s theory of alienation shows workers as both creative and estranged. These examples illustrate that ambiguity and coexistence, not clarity and uniformity, often define modern life.

Thus, quantum metaphors remind us that uncertainty is not the absence of understanding but a sign of complexity — and that observation itself, whether in science or society, changes what is observed. To recognise this is to accept responsibility: the act of looking, questioning, and interpreting is also an act of participation. In this sense, the observer effect is not limited to physics. Every social study, every public debate, every act of journalism alters what it observes. Recognising this responsibility — the role of agency — is a vital part of both scientific and civic inquiry. The Quantum Cat, seen in this light, becomes a symbol of reflective citizenship: one that questions, observes, and acts, knowing that observation affects reality.

The link between science and society defines KSSP’s legacy. Founded in 1962, it has grown beyond a science club into a people’s science movement connecting empirical reasoning with social progress. Its campaigns on environment, energy, health, and education have always sought to make knowledge democratic and life-oriented. The Quantum Cat campaign continues this mission, using a global scientific breakthrough to renew Kerala’s commitment to rational thought. From Halley’s Comet to Quantum Cat, the message remains the same – science belongs to the people. In 1986, KSSP volunteers explained that comets were celestial bodies, not omens, and forty years later, they travel again, showing that the cat is a metaphor for observation and reason. The persistence of astrology and pseudo-science reveals that education alone cannot ensure enlightenment. What is needed, as KSSP calls vijnanabodh, is the consciousness of science as a way of life—anchored in curiosity, scepticism, and empathy.

Toward a Culture of Reason

The Quantum Cat campaign, therefore, is not just a celebration of physics. It is a cultural intervention, telling that science and democracy share the same foundation – reasoned freedom. In an era when faith is marketed as fact and propaganda as knowledge, the defence of reason becomes a moral act.

Quantum theory offers a powerful metaphor for today’s struggle between reason and unreason. It shows that reality is not binary but a field of probabilities influenced by interaction, just as social progress depends on participation, dialogue, and openness. The spirit of quantum thought underlines democratic inquiry. In this sense, KSSP’s Quantum Cat invites young minds to look into the “box” of their own world, to question, observe, and think freely. It tells us that curiosity is not disobedience, doubt is not weakness, and imagination is part of knowledge.

As Babu Joseph says, “The Newtonian cat is either dead or alive; the quantum cat is both—until you look.” So too with society, it holds both reason and prejudice until we choose which to see. The campaign restores science’s humane meaning, not as apparatus but as a way of knowing that dignifies life and keeps curiosity alive amid ideological darkness.

K.M. Seethi

K.M. Seethi is is Director, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension (IUCSSRE), Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU), Kerala. He also served as ICSSR Senior Fellow, Senior Professor of International Relations and Dean of Social Sciences at MGU. One of his latest works is "ENDURING DILEMMA Flashpoints in Kashmir and India-Pakistan Relations."