The Forgotten Origin of the Porcine Uncertainty Principle


In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger introduced what would become one of the most famous thought experiments in physics: Schrödinger’s Cat.

The idea was simple enough. Place a cat in a sealed box with a quantum mechanism that may or may not kill it. Until the box is opened and observed, quantum mechanics suggests the cat must be treated as existing in a strange superposition of two possible states: alive and dead.

Schrödinger intended the whole thing to demonstrate how absurd quantum mechanics could become when applied to everyday objects.

But according to a little-known story, shortly after proposing the experiment, Schrödinger became dissatisfied with it.

The problem, he reportedly realized, was the cat.

Cats were simply too predictable.

If you put a cat in a box and closed the lid, there were really only two important questions: Was the cat alive? And was the cat dead?

Schrödinger felt this did not adequately capture the true chaos of uncertainty.

He needed an animal capable of producing a much larger range of possible outcomes.

That was when he turned to the pig.

A pig placed inside a barn presented an entirely different quantum problem.

Before opening the barn door, the pig could theoretically be:

still peacefully inside the barn,

in the neighbor’s vegetable garden,

halfway through a fence,

eating a boot,

standing somewhere it should not physically have been able to reach,

or calmly watching while several hundred dollars’ worth of property damage somehow accumulated around it.

Schrödinger immediately recognized that he had discovered something much deeper than the simple alive-or-dead uncertainty of the cat.

He called it the Porcine Uncertainty Principle:

The more certain you are of the pig’s location, the less certain you can be about the condition of your property.

Unlike Schrödinger’s Cat, the pig was assumed to be alive in almost every possible state.

The real uncertainty was what it was currently destroying.

This led to a second important discovery: Porcine Superposition, in which a pig left unobserved must be mathematically considered to be simultaneously inside the barn, outside the barn, in the garden, and eating something expensive.

Unfortunately, Schrödinger never formally published the theory.

Historians believe this was because shortly after completing his calculations, he opened the barn door.

His notes were never recovered.

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