I occasionally play this fun game with myself as to how Schrodinger’s cat (dead or alive or both or not) may unfold in real life. The bombshell disclosure by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director, James Comey that the agency is reviewing some more emails potentially linked to the Hillary Clinton email investigation comes reasonably close to Schrodinger’s cat in this season of harrowing uncertainty. (You have to be a true blue nerd to see how I connected Schrodinger’s cat with Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.)
Quite like Schrodinger’s cat, where we do not know whether the cat is dead or alive—therefore it could be both dead and alive simultaneously—until we open the box, we do not know whether what Comey found is deadly or not for the Clinton campaign until we read the emails ourselves. All you have to do here is replace the imaginary cat with emails and you have a clear parallel in real life of an astonishingly brilliant thought experiment.
There is popular consensus that there is no way we will know before the presidential election is over and result announced what those fraught emails on the disgraced Congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop/computer might contain. The FBI just does not have enough time in the next eight days to complete the legal process and sift through all of them to reach an unambiguous conclusion.
So we are left with Schrodinger’s feline paradox where the Clinton side can legitimately say that the emails are a minor sideshow while the Trump side can thump their chests in triumph and declare victory and imprison Clinton. When the cat is both dead and alive it is fair to celebrate its survival because the poison did not spill or mourn its death because the poison did indeed spill. Comey’s announcement has handed the Trump campaign license to spill whatever catches the man’s grotesquely fecund fancy. It is already happening.
I wanted to write about one of my favorite themes today, namely dark matter and how the celebrated theoretical physicist Lisa Randall deals with it in her book ‘Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe’. Instead, Schrodinger’s cat leapt out of my mind in a manner of speaking. If it leapt out, it means it is alive but I meant it only metaphorically. So it is still both dead and alive like the emails.
