There were so many tangents at Bible study tonight that I can’t recall what context brought it about, but I used Schrodinger’s Cat as a metaphor for whatever it was we were talking about. In my explanation, I fused the explanation of it with spooky action at a distance, but the principle is the same. In quantum mechanics, things do not have concrete states until you make a measure of something. Prior, the physics of the very small involves probability distributions – the particle is neither here nor there, it is only in a fuzzy probability location representing both/all locations.
Schrodinger’s Cat is a thought experiment whereby a real thing, a cat, is kept in a chamber with poisonous gas. The gas will be released if a certain atom decays. This decay is another one of those fuzzy things – if we don’t observe it, it hasn’t happened. It hasn’t not happened either. It remains undefined.
So…is the cat then alive or not alive? Has the decay occurred, if so it’s dead. Has it not occurred, then it is alive. The cat’s existence has now been smeared across two states, the cat himself straddling the living and the dead in some paradoxical way. The point of this thought experiment was to show the lunacy of following these esoteric theories to their logical conclusions.
The metaphorical point, however, is that the mere action of measuring/observing/investigating something necessarily reduces the possible states associated with it. I wrote about this last year in what was apparentlyBess’s favorite post. It harkens back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet – It is neither good nor bad, but that thinking makes it so. Until something is classified, it is not one or the other. Vague, nebulous, undefined, at all times all things. And then you say, “fine, I’ll bite,” and whoosh, all the sudden it’s not so complicated, not so interesting. It just is what it is and nothing more.
The point of this thought experiment remains the same as that of Schrodinger’s Cat. The thing recently scrutinized was what it was all along. The cat was dead or it was alive. It’s a property of you, namely your knowledge of the situation, that has changed.
It’s not the cat’s fault that it’s not a infinite smear of all things at all times.
Words 
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