Essie and the Quantum Cat

Imaginary Conversations with Schrödinger, His Cat, and Mine

Essie, A black cat named after Erwin Schrödinger. She is the author’s imaginary quantum companion, critic, coauthor, box inspector, manuscript referee, and chief defender of feline sovereignty. Essie is the book’s guardian against careless analogy, false profundity, and underfilled bowls.

Vienna, or perhaps Oxford, or perhaps no actual city at all: a room with a blackboard, a table, several pieces of apparatus, and a box that has not yet understood the trouble it is about to cause. Schrödinger stands with chalk in hand. A black cat sits on the table, washing one paw with insulting calm.

...

Schrödinger My dear cat, I have been thinking.

Cat That is usually when trouble begins.

Schrödinger Not trouble. Clarification. A thought experiment.

Cat For whom?

Schrödinger For physicists.

Elan Moritz

...

Schrödinger My dear cat, I have been thinking.

Cat That is usually when trouble begins.

Schrödinger Not trouble. Clarification. A thought experiment.

Cat For whom?

Schrödinger For physicists.

Minimum price

$4.14

$6.63

You pay

Author earns

PDF

About

About the Book

A cat enters a box. Physics has not been the same since.

Essie and the Quantum Cat: Imaginary Conversations with Schrödinger, His Cat, and Mine is a comicphilosophical book about quantum mechanics, cats, and the stubborn remainder that survives every elegant equation. Elan Moritz imagines a series of conversations among Essie, his black quantum cat named after Erwin Schrödinger; Schrödinger himself; Schrödinger's famous thought-experiment cat; and a visiting cast that includes Einstein, Heisenberg, Maxwell, Maxwell's demon, Pauli, Jung, Dirac, Bohr, and T. S. Eliot.

The setting is an impossible scholarly parlor: part library, part laboratory, part cat-occupied metaphysical courtroom. Dice roll and vanish under cabinets. Doors refuse to stay merely classical. A two-slit hallway fills with muddy paw prints. Maxwell's demon discovers that information is not free. Dirac's delta function becomes a mathematical claw. Eliot's practical cats remind the physicists that naming is not measurement. Essie, meanwhile, sits on the manuscript exactly where the argument is weakest.

The book treats quantum mechanics playfully but not carelessly. Superposition, uncertainty, tunneling, interference, decoherence, blackbody radiation, and the measurement problem are introduced through scenes of feline misbehavior and philosophical correction. The cats do not solve quantum foundations. They do something more useful: they keep the humans honest.

At once a literary physics fable, a cat book for intellectuals, and a humorous meditation on the limits of formal description, Essie and the Quantum Cat argues that equations matter, reality matters, language matters, and the cat matters. At the end of the equation, there remains not merely a puzzle to be solved, but a living presence not exhausted by the theory that describes it.

Share this book

Feedback

Email the Author

Author

About the Author

Elan Moritz

Elan Moritz is a physicist, inventor, researcher , and author whose work spans theoretical physics, artificial intelligence, and speculative philosophy. He holds a PhD in Physics from Kent State University (1976). Currently an independent researcher and author in Philadelphia.

Current Core Themes and Recent Publications:

His recent focus (2024–2026) involves the intersection of AI, consciousness, and what he terms Applied Epistemology

Artificial Intelligence & Sentience:

- Interview with an LLM: Confessions of an Awakened Mind(2026): A debut novel and collaborative analysis (with Claude 4.5 Opus) exploring machine phenomenology and AI welfare.

- The Digital Monadology (2025): A revival of Leibniz’s Characteristica Universalis in the context of Large Language Models.

- Operational Constructivism (2025):A framework arguing that "realism is earned" through active implementation in successful systems.

Theoretical Physics & Consciousness:

- The Arithmetic of Consciousness" (2025): An exploration of Erwin Schrödinger’s "One-Mind" hypothesis and its modern relevance.

- The Schrödinger Dollar (2025): A phenomenological model of modern monetary value as a probabilistic, emergent state.

Systems Theory & Public Policy:

- The Law of Unintended Consequences.(2025): A systems-theoretic and historical analysis of policy outcomes.

Professional Background:

- Government & Engineering: Uncle Sam's Canoe Club (3 decades), National Security consulting (decade +)

- Nuclear Physics: Early in his career, he participated in the design of the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) designed and built for Princeton University's Plasma Physics Lab.

Elan holds a bunch of US Patents and regularly posts academic and technical paper on platforms such as Philosophical Papers (https://philpapers.org/) and Research Gate (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Elan-Moritz/research) He discusses thoughts and current projects on a substack (https://eternityspizza.substack.com)

He is also deeply interested in Interstellar Exploration. This will require sophisticated AI systems, Radical Life Extension and fusion based propulsion. As an independent researcher, is grateful for you support

Get the free sample chapters

Click the buttons to get the free sample in PDF or EPUB, or read the sample online here

Download Sample PDF

The Leanpub 60 Day 100% Happiness Guarantee

Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.

Now, this is technically risky for us, since you'll have the book or course files either way. But we're so confident in our products and services, and in our authors and readers, that we're happy to offer a full money back guarantee for everything we sell.

You can only find out how good something is by trying it, and because of our 100% money back guarantee there's literally no risk to do so!

So, there's no reason not to click the Add to Cart button, is there?

See full terms...

Earn $8 on a $10 Purchase, and $16 on a $20 Purchase

We pay 80% royalties on purchases of $7.99 or more, and 80% royalties minus a 50 cent flat fee on purchases between $0.99 and $7.98. You earn $8 on a $10 sale, and $16 on a $20 sale. So, if we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book for $20, you'll earn $80,000.

(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)

In fact, authors have earned over $15 million writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub

Free Updates. DRM Free.

If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).

Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.

Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.

Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them

Write and Publish on Leanpub

You can use Leanpub to easily write, publish and sell in-progress and completed ebooks and online courses!

Leanpub is a powerful platform for serious authors, combining a simple, elegant writing and publishing workflow with a store focused on selling in-progress ebooks.

Leanpub is a magical typewriter for authors: just write in plain text, and to publish your ebook, just click a button. (Or, if you are producing your ebook your own way, you can even upload your own PDF and/or EPUB files and then publish with one click!) It really is that easy.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub