JJ´s Blog - Skins series 4

Hello and Wilkommen to Jonah's multiverse of physics! Continuing our in depth look at quantum mechanics, this weeks e-lecture will be regarding a man named Erwin Shrodinger and his fascination with dead cats. Shrodinger theorised that if you were to put a living cat (let's call him Horatio R. Fluffington for the sake of argument) into a sealed container, out of sight and shielded against the perils of environmentally induced quantum decoherence, that Mr Fluffington exists in all of his potential states until someone is able to see him and bring his state into recorded, and therefore tangible, being. This means potentially speaking the cat is both alive, dead, writing a sonnet, wearing a cowboy hat, redefining the way we love and cooking himself a delicious salmon with a bunsen burner all at the same time because no-one really knows what he's doing in there so we must prepare for and accept all possibilities.

Another simple way of explaining this in practise would be if Horatio R. Fluffington had two cat friends ( Smokey O'Whiskers and Scratchy Van Der Klaw) who had both fallen in love with Felicia LePurrs ( a lady cat) and then spent all their time fighting over her and making weird noises in the alley with her and then weren't properly friends anymore. And If Felicia went away to Italy with her mum for the summer without letting Scratchy or Smokey know exactly who she loved back and who she just wanted to make weird noises in the alley way with then that would mean that Smokey, Scratchy and unfortunately Horatio would all be in a state of half-life, existing in all the different possibilities that could possibly befall them.

I would hypothesis that the three whisketeers would probably just ignore that Felicia ever existed and spend their summer chasing big balls of string together and Smokey would eat all of the cat nip in the garden so he didn't have to worry about Felicia and Scratchy would chase down all the other lady cats that were left so he wouldn't have to worry about it either and it wouldn't matter if they were in half-life because they were all having such a nice time.

But Horatio would know and he would still remember and spend lots of time worrying about Felicia coming back because it would mean that the half-life would be over and things would be there in black and white like a dead cat and it might mean that Scratchy and Smokey would start fighting again. And Horatio would be all on his own. In a box.

Next: String Theory: How long is a piece?