There’s got to be some phrase, probably in French, to describe what happens when one learns a new word, phrase, or concept and then sees said word, phrase or concept everywhere one goes. For instance, my mother learned the alternate definition of the word “cougar” and then she heard it everywhere, and subsequently found a way to work it into every sentence she could.
In my case, after a lifetime of not knowing what it was, I had a weekend of being confronted with Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment. (I know, who hasn’t been confronted with it at some point?) It all started last week, when those of you who follow me religiously on Twitter already know, I saw an article on Cracked.com called Five Scientific Theories that Will Make Your Head Explode. All of them are really cool, even for those of us who have only a passing interest in physics. The third one on the list is called the “Copenhagen Interpretation” which is some heavy duty quantum physics, but boils down to the fact that electrons always do exactly what they’re supposed to do, until you watch them. At that point, their actions become entirely erratic and unpredictable, but for the fact that they always make a bunch of people in lab coats nuts.
Schrodinger’s cat (aside: I think that “Schrodinger” is the funnest name to say this side of “Dostoefsky.”) is a real-life, sadistic example of how viewing things changes them. The theory, which like so many gymnasts reaching for the high bar at the last minute, I just barely have a grasp of, starts off by sealing a cat in a box with a vial of poison gas. Said vial poison gas has a 50/50 chance of exploding, but the sadistic conductor of the experiment will not know if that’s happened or not. Meanwhile, Mr. Meow is in the box in a state of either dead or alive. Which is to say simultaneously dead and alive, because the results cannot be known until the observer opens the box, and until that time, the existence of the cat is just a probability wave.
Weird, huh? And even weirder, for various reasons, is that last night I was reading a Douglas Adams book for the first time in my life. Specifically, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, in which said detective is charged with the task of finding the cat from Schrodinger’s experiment, after it goes completely missing from the box. But that’s all part of the theory, you know. The cat can be alive or dead, or it can completely disappear, because technically anything can happen at any time. But maybe I’ll find out more when I’m able to finish the book later this week.
In the meantime, I’m looking for my own sealed box and vial of poison, and it’s going to have Micki’s name on it. It’s been almost two months since Lucy came to live with us, and she is not ready to cede an iota of her territory. The penultimate straw was a cat fight instigated by Micki on the kitchen table on Sunday morning that resulted in breaking a full glass of orange juice on top of the aforementioned book I’m reading, which is out of print and on loan from a friend. (Note to friend, if you have become a blog reader and are reading this: the book is fine, it turns out that hardcovers from 1987 have a protective coating that does not allow penetration by orange juice.) Sadly, the same cannot be said for my kitchen floor, which is still sticky after a mopping.
The last straw was when I decided that Micki was maybe feeling stressed about the fact that I shut her out of the upstairs since I she threw up on my bed three times in a row, after a 16 year history of only throwing up on hardwood. Since I haven’t seen her be sick in weeks, I figured she had nothing left in her system, and she’d appreciate having the extra space. So I opened the door, and Lucy and I spent some QT together on the downstairs couch reading and cuddling. When I went upstairs a few hours later, there it was: cat puke all over the bedspread. This is obviously a revenge tactic of sorts, but I’m telling you, I see no other option than a sealed box and a vial of poison.
It’s not entirely cruel, she does have a 50/50 shot…
