Wigner’s Friend
In a box in Wigner’s lab: the infamous cat. The isotope has decayed, toxin released, killing the cat—or it hasn’t, and you can’t know which.
Until the hermetically sealed box is opened, both outcomes exist, superposed; the cat, both alive and dead, yada, yada, yada.
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Now, Wigner, maybe squeamish, refuses to open the box. He sends a friend instead, into the lab—which is also hermetically sealed, because why not?
With trembling fingers (who wants to find a dead cat?) it’s this friend, then, who opens the box.
Wigner, however, realizes:
The whole lab is still in a superposed state—until Wigner breaks the seal, pushes back the door, shouting: “My friend! Tell me: How is the cat?”
The wave function collapses then, and not before.
Meanwhile, Wigner’s boss—the Chair of his Department—has hermetically sealed the whole wing of this ivied Princeton edifice on the grounds that: “We don’t do this kind of experiment, here. With cats? Please, Wigner! We’ve talked about this!”
But now, by the Chair’s reckoning: Wigner, Wigner’s friend, the cat, all are waiting for him to break the seal so that they can get beyond this both/and limbo in which the cat is alive and dead, the friend dutifully records both facts, and poor Wigner is—let’s face it, either way— about to be reprimanded because, hey:
We have talked about this.
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It should be noted here that the entire universe, chugging through the irreducible calculation of the sum total of all quantum events, remains hidden from a theoretical observer—is itself black-boxed—beyond the event horizon, swallowed, at the bottom of some black hole, perhaps.
And until that box can be opened, and the results observed, all superposed possibilities remain in flux.
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There ain’t nobody here but us Schrödinger’s Cats.
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The fact that the math actually works this way has led some to question the whole notion of objective reality. These people have clearly not been paying attention before now.
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