Schrödinger’s Life
On living without asking for anything
Have you ever not done something, because if you started, you’d find out whether you could actually do the thing? Or maybe you avoided talking to someone about something important, because if you never ask for anything, no one can disappoint you?
I call this living Schrödinger’s Life, after the quantum physicist’s metaphorical cat in the box.1 You all probably know of this thought experiment, whose party name is “the paradox of quantum superposition.” The thought experiment is designed to help people like me with English degrees understand how the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics (that’s the school of Bohr and his acolytes) seems to prove that things can exist in a multiplicity of states until they’re looked at, basically.
In this thought experiment, an absolute sociopath has put a cat in a box with a flask of poison, a dollop of radioactive material, and a Geiger counter that will smash the flask if it detects radiation. The natural assumption is that the cat will die. But according to the Copenhagen interpretation, the cat is (very creepily) both dead AND alive until we open the box and look at it (fixing its position), and see whether or not it is indeed pining for the fjords.
This thought experiment was meant to point out how ridiculous Schrödinger found…
