Legends, Myths & Paradoxes
The most famous cats who never needed a surname
Cats have prowled through mythology, fairy tales, poetry and even physics. Meet the icons — every portrait below drawn from scratch — then open a certain box, and let a poet name your cat.
Original portraits
The hall of legendary cats
Eight famous felines — the mythical, the literary, the comic and the scientific — each illustrated from scratch.
Interactive · Physics
Schrödinger's cat: open the box
In 1935 Erwin Schrödinger imagined a cat sealed in a box with a random trigger — both alive and dead until observed. It was meant to show how absurd quantum superposition sounds at cat-scale. Try it (no cats are harmed — it's a thought experiment).
The box is sealed. The cat is neither — and both.
What's really going on
Before you look, quantum mechanics describes the cat as a superposition — a blend of "alive" and "dead" at once. The act of observing forces reality to pick one. That's the paradox: nothing so big as a cat should behave like a particle.
Schrödinger wasn't predicting zombie cats — he was poking fun at an interpretation of quantum theory. Nearly a century later, physicists still argue about what "observation" really means. The cat, meanwhile, just wants out of the box.
Cats in poetry
The Naming of Cats
In T.S. Eliot's 1939 Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats — the poems behind the musical Cats — he insists every cat needs three names: a sensible everyday name, a fancier dignified one, and a third:
“But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover —
But the cat himself knows, and will never confess.”
— from “The Naming of Cats”, T.S. Eliot
Name a cat, Eliot-style
Generate all three names for your (real or imaginary) cat.
- Everyday name
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- Dignified name
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- Ineffable secret name
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