Paris, Present day
The experiment isn’t working.
It was working ten minutes ago, which makes this particularly irritating. The screen doesn’t flicker, and numbers don’t hesitate as you see in science fiction movies, just the data don’t fit with the theory. Reality disagrees with our expectations. Someone leans back in their chair. Someone else stares at the code as if it might confess.
“Quoi?” “That can’t be right.” “It was stable.” “Run it again.”
They do. Same result. The room is quiet in the specific way labs become quiet when a perfectly reasonable and calculated experimental setup refuses to cooperate.
Sigma is sitting on the bench, exactly where he shouldn’t be sitting, tail wrapped neatly around his paws. He watches without urgency, without alarm, as though this is all unfolding at a perfectly reasonable pace. Another run. Still wrong.
“Okay,” someone sighs. “What are we missing?”
Sigma shifts. Not dramatically. He stands, stretches once, and steps a little closer to the edge of the bench. His eyes settle on one corner of the setup. The physicists notice. They’re smart. Of course they notice.
“What?” one of them says, leaning in.
They follow his gaze. The cable looks connected. It feels connected…It isn’t. There’s a small adjustment. A click. The data begin re-populating the plot, and the wigner function is back where it was expected.
A quiet pause.
“Right,” someone mutters. “That was it.”
Sigma is already back in his original position, tail neatly wrapped again, expression unchanged.
He never really helps. Not directly. If he’s in the mood, he might react just enough for you to help yourself. If he isn’t, he’ll simply watch you struggle. With patience, even… amusement, some would say.
He is used to seeing humans certainties crumble when their understanding of reality doesn’t agree with their observations, he is the very materialization of one of those moments, after all.
If you know Alice & Bob, you’ve seen him. The cat on our logo. Calm. Sharp. Slightly judgmental. The one staring back at you as if he knows something you don’t. (He probably does.)
This is the story of that cat.
His name is Sigma.
And he was born in 1935.
Vienna, 1935
The professor walking circles in front of the blackboard does not look like a man about to create a legend. He looks tired. Mid-forties, sharp features, round glasses. Chalk dust on the sleeves of an otherwise careful suit. His knowledge is vast, his patience is not.
For yet another time a student asks about quantum mechanics. It had become some kind of “fashion” statement between young physicists. Blindly believing the new theory without even taking the time to think about it. He had built it, with Albert, Niels, Werner, and all the others. He derived that nonsense. Yes, it works, but it cannot be true. Quantum mechanics leads to meaningless situations where particles are everywhere and nowhere at the same time, where reality does not exist until someone looks at it.
“Professor, so you’re saying,” someone in the classroom presses, “that reality must be deterministic? That your equation is finally wrong?” His equation, his greatest achievement, his greatest mistake.
“I’m saying,” Schrödinger replied carefully, “That it looks like it does. But this must be an accident, some clever and… very hidden, mathematical trick. Because it cannot.”
“But then how do you explain so many experiments?” echoed another student on the right side of the small classroom.
Schrödinger’s Thought Experiment
His eyes wandered around, tired; but then, they stumbled upon a sealed box in a corner of the room. Brilliant!
“So you are ready to believe the weirdest of principles in order to explain some experiments?” Resumed Schrödinger with a new light behind the lenses of his thick glasses. “Well, then, since you are so fond of experiments explain this one to me.” “Before you all entered here, I took that box over there, in the corner. Yes, that one. And before closing it tight, I carefully placed inside a single radioactive atom.” The class was all of a sudden more silent than usual. “And since you are all certain that it is possible for atoms to be simultaneously in multiple states, you would agree that our atom has both decayed and not decayed, until we open the box to check…”
“Yes, Herr Professor! The atom obeys the law of quantum mechanics” a girl from the first row answered with certainty.
“Very well, but would anything change if I were to put a Geiger counter insider the box, or whatever other instrument capable of monitoring if such a decay has occurred?”
Only the occasional squeaking of the wooden benches where the students were sitting interrupted the silence for a few long seconds. Finally a voice erupts “No! The counter is also made of atoms, and until we look at it, it will be simultaneously in two states. Having counted the decay and not!”
“Exactly my point! Do you see the contradiction?”
Silence.
“Ok, suppose that together with the atom and the counter I did put… a cat! Yes, a cat!”
The students sat puzzled.
“And… and a small flask of poison, connected to the counter, ready to break and kill the cat the very moment in which the atom decays.”
He had them. A few faces started smiling. His eyes wondered around the class, to finally fix on the young man that asked the question:
“So answer me this: is the cat dead or alive? For if quantum mechanics is true, the atom has decayed and not. And so the counter has detected and not detected. And the cat has been killed and not. So the cat must be dead and alive. ”He let these last words sink in for a moment to then conclude: “Which is of course, impossible”. “Enough for today, if you don’t mind I wish to write to an old colleague of mine,” he greeted the students. As the last of them was stepping out of the classroom Schrödinger had already started his letter:
“Dear Albert, …
Schrödinger’s cat
Unknown to everyone, while this conversation was taking place, something was happening inside the box. For in that small metal container, Sigma was born, dead and alive, everywhere and nowhere, yet real as quantum mechanics.
The cat is not just imagined, it had been defined. And in that act of definition, in that precise assignment of a superposed state, The Cat, takes form. Not dramatically. No lightning hit. One moment he is an idea spoken aloud in a chalk-dusted room. The next, he is there!
Small. Moody. Smart. His fur seems to swallow the light. His eyes are sharp and unimpressed. He does not look confused. He looks as if he has been waiting for mathematics to catch up. He is inside the box, but outside too, near the wall, tail curling once around his paws. He stretches. He yawns. The humans do not notice. They are arguing about his condition. Sigma listens.
He learns something immediately: humans are uncomfortable with indeterminacy. They want the box opened. They want the story resolved. Why do they need reality to choose?
Sigma does not share this urgency. He was born inside uncertainty. He is, quite literally, a quantum cat!
From Paradox to Practice
Over the years, “Schrödinger’s cat” travels. It appears in lecture halls, textbooks, late-night debates. Alive and dead at the same time, it’s repeated so often it begins to sound… simple?
Sometimes it’s explained carefully. Sometimes it’s delivered like a party trick. Sigma hears both.
In certain rooms, the paradox becomes performance. The sentence is the point. Sigma stays for a while, then leaves. He has no interest in being a clever decoration.
But elsewhere, quantum mechanics is no longer a philosophical irritation. It’s hardware. It drifts. It breaks. It needs discipline.
“Measure it.” “Check again.” “Start simple.”
There is less explaining and more fixing. And. Something about the tone is different?
Sigma notices.
He doesn’t announce his decision. He simply finds himself staying longer in rooms where the work matters more than the argument.
Eventually, that’s how he finds himself in Paris.
The lab is modest. Focused. An experiment misbehaves. Nobody blames reality. They assume they’ve missed something and go looking for it.
No speeches. No metaphors. Just work.
Sigma waits to see if anyone turns the moment into a lecture. Thankfully, no one does so he stays.
Why Sigma?
The small lab becomes Alice & Bob.
The cat appears in sketches, in diagrams, and in something more serious: the cat qubit, where quantum information is encoded in a way that protects it by design.
At some point, someone asks what to call him.
“Sigma” feels right.
In science, the symbol sigma (σ) shows up when variations matter. When things are summed carefully. When you cannot ignore the details. It shows up in equations that refuse to simplify too easily.
It suited him.
He was born from superposition. He grew up around uncertainty. He has always preferred the parts of physics that resist simplification.
One afternoon, when a stubborn instability finally settles, someone looks at him.
“You knew that would work, didn’t you?” Sigma looks back, expression unchanged. He does not confirm. He does not deny. He doesn’t need to. He was there when the paradox was first spoken aloud. He watched it become architecture.
And of all the rooms he has observed, this is the one he chose.
And if you’re wondering how a quantum company ended up named after two other characters borrowed from scientific history, the story begins long before Paris.
That’s next, stay tuned.
