You’ve no doubt heard of “Schrödinger’s Cat,” the famous thought-experiment about cramming a house cat into a steel chamber along with poison and a radioactive trigger—I think it was discussed on a very special episode of NBC’s “Quantum Leap.”
Schrödinger p0wned some Danish dunderheads.
Back in 1935, Austrian physicist and likely cat-strangler, Erwin Schrödinger, pantsed the reigning school of quantum thought with his shocking cat-locked-in-a-box scenario, explaining that the cat could be considered simultaneously alive and dead—a state known as a quantum superposition—because its “aliveness” was linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not happen.
Yet Schrödinger wasn’t advocating for the poisoning or imprisonment of cats, though a lot of them are undeniably criminals. Instead, he was exposing flaws in the Copenhagen Interpretation, a quantum theory with more holes than a sci-fi plot about correcting historical mistakes by forcibly possessing people’s bodies without their knowledge or consent.
The Danes thought seeing wasn’t just believing, it was reality-making.
The Copenhagen theory held that a quantum system remains in superposition until it is observed by someone in the external world. What?!? I mean, were those guys high?
Simplistically, that meant that a tree hasn’t fallen in a forest until someone observes it one way or the other. Until then, the tree remains in a state of unactualized limbo, like Scott Bakula waiting to win an Oscar.®
Stupid, right? Of course, it is.
The Copenhagen theory doesn’t hold water because every human being currently living within this Newtonian simulation we call “reality” knows that two different states cannot be true at once—the cat is either dead or alive, the tree is either fallen or still standing, and Sam Beckett’s either a real physicist who leaps through spacetime or he’s not.
That’s just science.
The CrosbyReport™ quantum conundrum.
Yet what’s true in the large physical world isn’t always true in the tiny quantum realm. This was made clear by another famous physicist, Werner Heisenberg, with his lesser-known “email uncertainty principle.”
Published in 1927, some 44 years before the invention of email, this shockingly prescient theory held that an email is both spam and not spam before being “observed” by its intended recipient. Heisenberg showed that unread emails exist simultaneously in a purgatory between the inbox and a fetid, digital cesspool of erectile dysfunction come-ons, teeth whitening scams, and mesothelioma class-action lawsuits.
The deciding factor being the existence of the sender’s email address in the recipient’s contact list, and not the unnecessary radioactive poisoning and/or slow suffocation of a very pissed-off tabby.
Take control of quantum chaos.
You can eliminate at least one atomic-level ambiguity from your time-stream by adding my email address to your computer’s address book, it’s easy—here’s how to do it.
By resolving that corpuscular cliffhanger, you’ll ensure that you never miss a CrosbyReport™ newsletter, as well as wrest back the free will you lost while Dr. Beckett was inside your body…you know, doing really freaky stuff.
