SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

SCHRODINGER THE MAN

Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.

–neils bohr, quoted by beynam, Future Science

Erwin Schrodinger did a lot more than just make up mathematical riddles about fictitious cats. His equations describing subatomic wave mechanics, which earned him a Nobel Prize, were among the most important contributions to particle theory in our century. Later, he turned his attention to biophysics and in a small book called What Is Life? he offered the first mathematical definition of the difference between living and dead systems, throwing off as a side reflection the idea that life is negative entropy. This insight was to trigger quite a few new ideas in many of his readers, including Norbert Wiener of MIT and Claud Sha

The Cat problem presupposes a Cat, a device of lethal nature, such as a gun or a poison-gas pellet, and a quantum process which will, eventually, trigger the weapon and kill the Cat. Very simple. An experimenter, if he wanted to find out when the device had fired and killed the Cat, would look into the laboratory where all this was transpiring and note what actually happened. But- Schrodinger points out with some glee-modern physics, if it's all it's cracked up to be, should allow us to find out what is happening without our actually going into the laboratory to look. All we have to do is write down the equations of the quantum process and calculate when the phase change leading to detonation will occur. The trouble is that the equations yield, at minimum, two solutions. At any given time-say one half hour-the equations give us two quantum eigenvalues, one of which means that the Cat is now definitely dead, kaput, spurlos versenkt, finished, and the other which tells us that the Cat is still alive as you and me.

Most physicists preferred to ignore Schrodinger 's damned Cat; quantum mechanics worked, after all, and why make a big thing about something a little fu

Einstein loved Schrodinger 's Cat because it mathematically demonstrated his own conviction that subatomic events couldn't be as anarchistic as wave mechanics seemed to imply. Einstein was a Hidden Variable man. He claimed there must be a Hidden Variable-an Invisible Hand, as Adam Smith might have said-controlling the seemingly indeterminate quantum anarchy. Einstein was sure that the Hidden Variable was something quite deterministic and mechanical, which would be discovered eventually. "God does not play dice with the world," he liked to say.

Decade followed decade and the Hidden Variable remained elusive.

In the 1970s, Dr. Evan Harris Walker solved the Cat paradox (to his own satisfaction) and defined the Hidden Variable (to his own satisfaction). The Hidden Variable, he said, was consciousness. There was muttering in some quarters that Walker was smuggling pantheism into physics disguised as quantum psychology, but many younger physicists-especially the acid-heads-accepted the Walker solution.

Professor John Archibald Wheeler of Princeton found another way of dealing with the Cat; he took it literally. Every quantum indeterminacy, he proposed, creates two universes; thus, the equations are literally true and in one universe the Cat lives and in another universe the cat dies. We can only experience one universe at a time, of course, but if the math says the other universe is there, then by God it is there. Furthermore, since.5 probabilities occur continually-every time you toss a coin, for instance-there are many, many such universes, perhaps an infinite number of them. With two graduate students named Everett and Graham, Wheeler even worked up a model of where the other universes were. They were on all sides of us, in superspace.

Some were heard to suggest that old Wheeler had been reading too much science fiction.

TO CROSS AGAIN

If I offer a child the choice between a pear and a piece of meat, he'll immediately take the pear. That's his instinct speaking.

–furbish lousewart V, Unsafe Wherever You Go

Mountbatten Babbit, being methodical in all things including his madness, could pinpoint exactly the date on which he had started sliding over the porous membrane separating the sane from the insane. It had been long, long ago-back in 1941, actually, in July, the twenty-third of the month, a Thursday.

Or perhaps it had actually started the night before, on the twenty-second. It was hard to say, actually, even though Babbit was a man who detested imprecision of any sort. Say it was the twenty-second, then, even though the overt symptom did not manifest until the twenty-third. We do want to be as accurate as possible when we're lost out here.

So say the twenty-second: Mountbatten was a freshman at Antioch College then and the Carter Brothers Carnival was playing in nearby Xenia. Mounty and some friends went over to have a look-see. Since Mounty personally didn't wait around for the post-midnight private exhibition of the lustful mulatto lady and the randy pony, advertised by shills in the crowd, the high point of the show for him had been the Mentalist, Cagliostro the Great.

A girl assistant, in as brief a costume as the carnival could get away with back in nearly antediluvian 1941 and barbaric Ohio, circulated through the audience, while Cagliostro, youngish and handsome for this racket, sat blindfolded on the stage.

"Now what am I holding?" she would ask when somebody handed her a watch.

"I get the image of a timepiece… yes, a wristwatch," the magician intoned.

"What do I have in my hand this time?" The answer was a locket.

"Can you tell me what this object is?"

A wallet photo.

Driving back to Yellow Springs, the students fell into a debate. One guy from the psychology department gave a long spiel on Rhine and parapsychology and scientific data for ESP, which convinced almost everyone. Babbit was the exception. He was not only a chemistry major but a leading firebrand for the Atheist Club on campus and he knew damned well that ESP was pseudo-scientific balderdash and hocus-pocus.

He spent the next day, the twenty-third, in the library, researching stage magic and, in a biography of Houdini, he found the answer. A simple substitution code. Now what = watch. What do I have = locket. Can you tell = photo. And so forth. Fraud, pure and simple, like everything that goes under the name of religion or magic.

Sirius shone very bright that night in the southern sky and Mounty Babbit was back at the carnival, loaded for bear. When the girl approached his part of the audience, he handed her a prized and illegal possession: a dragon-headed Japanese condom.

"Tell me what I have been given by this person."

That wasn't in the Houdini code but neither was a condom, with or without a dragon head.