I am sure I am wrong in my interpretation of the concept, but I am almost positive of the meaning that arises from my misinterpretation. I was precocious once, a long time ago, in my youth, but I am no genius. The details of particle physics, I cannot be sure that I have grasped them accurately.
With that caveat out of the way, Shroedinger was a scientist who put a cat in a box with a radioactive substance which, he was sure, had an exactly fifty-fifty chance of decaying. If it did decay, it would make the box toxic and the cat would die. If it did not decay, the cat would be safe, as if it had been alone in the box all this time.
Before you open the box, at that moment when your hand rests on the latch, just about to lift: is the cat dead or alive?
According to my misinterpretation, it is both. Shroedinger's cat was an experiment in probbilitty. Meant to demonstrate that if something has a chance of happening, it will.
So if the cat has a chance of living, it will, and at the same time, if there is a chance that the substance will twist in on itself, begin to burn and excude poison rays of radioactivity that will pierce the cat’s skin, causing it to shrivel and shrink and suddenly, soundlessly, quickly, expire, that too, will occur.
The universe splits at the moment you open the box. In one universe, you open the box to lift out a bewildered but unharmed cat, and in another universe you open the box to the smoking carcass. Every choice we make generates another universe in this fashion, and so life is a series of ramifications, universes splitting constantly, every time a life reaches a crossroads, multiplying like the branches of a baobab tree. Every time we face options, each option get its own parallel universe where it succeeds, every choice is realized somewhere.
What this means is that, somewhere, in a universe somewhere, we are all happy.
Those choices we made wrong, which doomed us to becoming what we now are, are undone, unmade, and we survived.
And not just one universe, because even after we made that defining mistake, it is the nature of the journey of life that we meet moments of redemption, times when a small trifle can change our fortunes and make everything right. Of course there is no point in looking for these moments-- they are never what you expect, they are as accidental as the great mistake that fucked you up in the first place. And they are smaller—“if I never walked into that shop that day, I would never have met your mother.” “If I hadn’t lost my keys, I wouldn’t have taken that bus,” “If I had chosen otherwise, I would never have come upon the serendipitous accident that changed my life.”
They are undetectable, unpredictable, but they exist. And somewhere, in some other life, you didn’t miss it, and you got your second chance.
Does that comfort you? Knowing that right now, right now, you are not stuck in the dungeons of your waste and decay, that you are somewhere else living your dreams?
With that caveat out of the way, Shroedinger was a scientist who put a cat in a box with a radioactive substance which, he was sure, had an exactly fifty-fifty chance of decaying. If it did decay, it would make the box toxic and the cat would die. If it did not decay, the cat would be safe, as if it had been alone in the box all this time.
Before you open the box, at that moment when your hand rests on the latch, just about to lift: is the cat dead or alive?
According to my misinterpretation, it is both. Shroedinger's cat was an experiment in probbilitty. Meant to demonstrate that if something has a chance of happening, it will.
So if the cat has a chance of living, it will, and at the same time, if there is a chance that the substance will twist in on itself, begin to burn and excude poison rays of radioactivity that will pierce the cat’s skin, causing it to shrivel and shrink and suddenly, soundlessly, quickly, expire, that too, will occur.
The universe splits at the moment you open the box. In one universe, you open the box to lift out a bewildered but unharmed cat, and in another universe you open the box to the smoking carcass. Every choice we make generates another universe in this fashion, and so life is a series of ramifications, universes splitting constantly, every time a life reaches a crossroads, multiplying like the branches of a baobab tree. Every time we face options, each option get its own parallel universe where it succeeds, every choice is realized somewhere.
What this means is that, somewhere, in a universe somewhere, we are all happy.
Those choices we made wrong, which doomed us to becoming what we now are, are undone, unmade, and we survived.
And not just one universe, because even after we made that defining mistake, it is the nature of the journey of life that we meet moments of redemption, times when a small trifle can change our fortunes and make everything right. Of course there is no point in looking for these moments-- they are never what you expect, they are as accidental as the great mistake that fucked you up in the first place. And they are smaller—“if I never walked into that shop that day, I would never have met your mother.” “If I hadn’t lost my keys, I wouldn’t have taken that bus,” “If I had chosen otherwise, I would never have come upon the serendipitous accident that changed my life.”
They are undetectable, unpredictable, but they exist. And somewhere, in some other life, you didn’t miss it, and you got your second chance.
Does that comfort you? Knowing that right now, right now, you are not stuck in the dungeons of your waste and decay, that you are somewhere else living your dreams?
Comments
I will just settle in comfortable unease.
@inktus, unbowed but bloody?