Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Schrodinger's Litterbox

A long time ago some really brainy guy named Schrodinger had entirely too much free time- he started wondering about quantum physics, cats and decaying particles of lethally radioactive elements.

He had to be nuts. And kinda cruel.

He proposed that if you put your cat in a closed box with a radioactive pellet that had exactly 50/50 odds of decaying (killing poor tabby) inside a certain time span- you wouldn't be able tell if your cat was dead or not without opening the box.

Well, duh.

Really though, what he meant was that until the actual event ( particle emission or not -50/50 on croaking the cat) was observed, every potential reality : cat goes to kitty heaven; cat is fine; a comet hits the Earth before Schrodinger opens the box- literally infinite possibilities- are all undetermined . Think about that. How can you disprove it?

This is a pretty fucking complicated way of asking the old "if a tree falls with no one to hear it, does it still make a sound?" question . Who cares? Clap one hand if you do.

Well, I'm unemployed. The radio thing is volunteer work (no $) and the firm set the temps free- a day after we get our carpool idea working.
Who cares?.
I've got a quantum doppleganger in a parallel universe -he has two jobs. Let him deal with it.

2 comments:

Lyzard said...

Prepare to laugh, and read this.

Allan said...

Read what?