View from the North 40: Schrodinger was obviously onto something

This week’s recurring theme in my life is the thought experiment called Schrodinger’s cat.

I’m going to do my best to explain the background of Schrodinger’s cat, but right off the bat, I want to make it clear that it’s called a thought experiment because no one actually did anything to an actual cat.

So here’s the deal, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger was trying to illustrate the difference between classical physics and some new-age level, mind-blowing physics that said quantum mechanics theory was incomplete. Who among us hasn’t thought the same thing, am I right? Well, I think this a good point at which to explain that I have no clue what quantum mechanics is — or quantum theory or quantum superposition nor even the Copenhagen Interpretation.

You know why? Because all that right there is some next-level Einstein stuff. Literally. Albert Einstein and a couple of his physicist buddies, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, were writing about things like entangled wave functions and scientifically proving the existence of multiple universes.

So Schrodinger, who was pen pals with Einstein, told the world, “Hey look, imagine, if you will, you put a cat in a steel box along with an atom of radioactive material, a Geiger counter, a hammer and a vial of poison. If the radioactive material decays, it will set of the Geiger counter, which will trigger a hammer that breaks the poison bottle and that then kills the cat. The way this illustrates a multi-universe explanation is that we can’t see into or hear through this steal box, so there’s two possibilities of what’s going on. Classical theory says that cat is alive OR dead, but Einstein and his posse say that the cat is both alive AND dead. It’s a working theory.”

And then there was something something something about how lifting off the lid to see what state the cat is in splits those two universes into more universes and so on into infinity and beyond.

Now you know as much as I know about the topic. You’re welcome.

Honestly, I don’t even know why Schrodinger used a cat for his imagery. Why isn’t it Schrodinger’s lab rat or Schrodinger’s ficus or Schrodinger’s petri dish of bacteria that’s from yogurt someone forgot in the fridge? I like to think it’s because we would care more about a cat, and so the imagery would stick with us.

In fact, this is what started me down Schrodinger’s path. Last weekend, I was headed to the bedroom and could see from the far end of the hallway that my cat, Tony, was so comfortably, completely and soundly asleep at the foot of the bed that he was flipped onto his back and didn’t wake up as I approached. Both conditions were highly unusual for the quarter-feral beast.

I stood in the bedroom doorway and wondered — quietly in my head so I wouldn’t disturb him — “Are you Schrodinger’s cat? Are you both alive and dead, and I won’t know which until I reach out and touch your soft, furry underbelly? Will doing that split us into whole new universes of pain for me and crabbiness for you?”

He woke up and yawned his fangs at me, while blinking innocently. We’ll never know for certain, now.

But with Schrodinger’s cat on my brain still, a few days later I contemplated my unfinished shower, which is waiting for the tile to be put up on the walls. All that time I’m currently not wasting running to town in multiple trips could be spent installing tile, right? And, yet, I haven’t started on the project. No need for psychoanalysis here, it’s fear holding me back.

I’ve done some test tiling with mixed results, so I’m worried that when I do the actual shower tiling I’ll screw it up.

“But,” I realized in my head later, “if you don’t tile the shower, isn’t that a form of screwing up, too?”

Seriously, I was so impressed with my own profound thought I stopped walking in the middle of my driveway and said out loud like I was announcing the second coming or a new Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream flavor, “Schrodinger’s tiles.”

I have both screwed up and not screwed up my shower at the same time.

Right now, with no one around to tell me I’m wrong, or distract me with real discussions and tasks, I’m completely convinced I’m operating at Einstein level theory analysis.

In fact, if he and Schrodinger were alive, I would write them a letter. I mean, I have the time to do it, right? Am I not both active and inactive at the same time here in my pandemic isolation? Where, by being inactive, I am actively helping stop a pandemic.

Could this be Schrodinger’s pandemic response?

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Are we not both alone and together in this at once at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 ?