Schrodinger’s victory
Or, taking what you don’t know into the realm of quantum physics
Background: I play an online trivia game called Learned League. If you like trivia, check it out, it's really fun. Each day is a head-to-head, and you play both offense (answering the questions) and defense (assigning points to your opponent's answers based on your guess about whether they'll get them right or not).
This morning, when I told my son I'd submitted but didn't know whether I'd won yet, he remarked that it was Schrödinger's victory. In other words, at that moment I had both won and lost. When the yes-or-no answer remains to be revealed, according to Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, it's both.
The scenario goes like this: a cat is in a box, along with a flask of poison and a Geiger counter. If there's even a smidgen of radiation, the flask shatters and the cat dies. You won't know until you open the box whether the cat is alive or dead, so as far as you're concerned, the cat is both alive and dead until then.
I have a problem getting my head around this idea, so I googled it and discovered that Schrödinger didn't actually buy into it either. He proposed the scenario to Einstein as a way of arguing against the quantum theory of superposition (an atom can be in two places at the same time—I think that's right). The quantum physics loses me, but as a side note, I will say that Schrödinger clearly had a tender spot when it came to cats. (If you read last week’s post, you’ll know what I mean.) There’s got to be some life history behind a scenario like that!
What I love about this story, aside from how revealing it is about Schrödinger as a character, is how revealing it is about human nature. This snippet of conversation between two brilliant physicists has parked itself in our collective awareness, even if most of us don't really get what Schrödinger was talking about. As humans, we like to know, because not knowing makes us feel unsure and therefore unsafe. Yet we live our lives in a constant state of not knowing far more than we know. So, how incredibly seductive is the idea that when we don't know whether something is "this" or "that," we could say we know that it's both at the same time!
I'm not really sure where this is taking me, except to the obvious conclusion that saying we know when we don't know is a) potentially ridiculous, which I think Schrödinger would have agreed with; and b) beside the point. Since co-writing Write What You Don't Know, I've become a bit of a connoisseur of not knowing. A long time ago I did the Landmark Forum course, and one of the most useful things I learned was that not-knowing is more powerful than knowing. When you're in a mindset of knowing, you're limited to what you know. When you're in a mindset of not-knowing, the possibilities are infinite.
Next week, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Just kidding. Or not. Both, until you open the post?