In Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai, the resident science brain Rio Futaba lays out the show's central idea: "There's a theory called observation theory — the idea that things in this world only have their existence fixed once someone observes them." She points to Schrödinger's cat. Mai Sakurajima is literally fading from the world because people have stopped perceiving her, and she's "fixed" back into existence when Sakuta forces the world to see her again.
As a metaphor, it's genuinely lovely. As physics, it's the most common misunderstanding of Schrödinger's cat there is — and, ironically, the exact opposite of what Schrödinger was trying to say.
Let's set the record straight, because Bunny Girl Senpai is far from alone in getting this wrong.
Misconception #1: Schrödinger wasn't impressed — he was mocking it
Here's the part almost everyone misses. Erwin Schrödinger didn't propose his cat in 1935 to reveal a profound truth about reality. He proposed it as a reductio ad absurdum — a logical argument designed to show that a premise leads to a ridiculous conclusion.
His target was exactly the idea Bunny Girl Senpai runs with: the notion that a system has no definite state until someone observes it. Schrödinger's point was, essentially, "If you take that seriously, you'd have to believe a cat could be both alive and dead — which is obviously absurd." He was making fun of the interpretation, not endorsing it.
So using the cat to support "things aren't real until observed" inverts the whole joke.
The backstory: Einstein's gunpowder and a shared weapon
The cat wasn't even a lone idea — it was forged in one of the great correspondences in physics. In May 1935, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen published the famous EPR paper, arguing that quantum mechanics was incomplete. Schrödinger wrote to Einstein about it that June, and the two traded letters all summer.
In one of those letters, Einstein offered his own thought experiment: picture an unstable keg of gunpowder that, after a while, the quantum formalism would be forced to describe as a superposition of exploded and not-exploded at the same time. Obviously absurd for something that big — and that was precisely his point.
Schrödinger took Einstein's gunpowder and made it unforgettable. That November, in a paper titled "The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics" — the same paper in which he coined the term "entanglement" — he swapped the keg for a cat. Einstein was delighted; he saw the paradox as a shared weapon against the idea that quantum theory was a complete description of reality.
In other words: Schrödinger's cat was co-designed by two of the most famous skeptics of quantum weirdness, specifically to attack the "nothing is real until it's observed" reading. Which makes using it to endorse that reading doubly ironic.
Misconception #2: "observation" doesn't mean a person looking
This is the big one. In quantum mechanics, "measurement" or "observation" means any physical interaction that extracts information from a system — not a conscious mind perceiving it.
In the thought experiment, the Geiger counter already interacts with the radioactive atom. The poison mechanism, the air in the box, the walls — all of it is constantly "observing." There is no special role for a human eyeball. The romantic idea that your awareness is what conjures reality into being simply isn't how the physics works.
What actually happens: decoherence
Modern physics has a name for why we never see a half-alive cat (or a person flickering out of existence): decoherence.
A single atom can sit in a quantum superposition because it can be isolated. But a cat — or a high-school girl — is made of trillions of particles in constant contact with their environment: photons, air molecules, heat. That environment "measures" the object continuously and almost instantaneously, destroying any superposition before it could ever become visible. The cat is always, definitely, either alive or dead. Mai was always really there or really not — no audience required.
The honest caveat
Here's where intellectual honesty matters: the cat still points at a real, unsolved puzzle. Decoherence explains why we don't see superpositions, but the deeper measurement problem — why any single, definite outcome happens at all — remains genuinely open after nearly 90 years, and physicists still argue about it fiercely. So the experiment isn't "solved and silly." It's a serious finger pointing at a real mystery.
What it is not is evidence that consciousness creates reality.
So why does the wrong version stick?
Because it's beautiful. "You make things real by paying attention to them" is a deeply human, deeply poetic idea — which is exactly why it makes such good fiction. Bunny Girl Senpai isn't a physics lecture; it's a story about how being seen by others shapes who we are, and how it feels to vanish when the world looks away. As a metaphor for adolescence and belonging, the misreading works perfectly.
The real science is humbler and stranger: the cat was a joke about absurdity, the "observer" was never you, and the genuine mystery sits one level deeper than the anime ever needed to go.
Both versions are worth knowing. Just don't mix them up at a party.
Want more shows that play with big ideas? Browse our all-time rankings or this season's Buzz charts.
Sources: Schrödinger's cat — Wikipedia, What is Schrödinger's Cat? — QuEra, Schrödinger's Cat — Science Notes, Schrödinger's notebooks and the history of the EPR paradox — IQOQI Vienna, Einstein–Schrödinger, summer of 1935 — LiveCatDeadCat