Schrödinger's cat

A smart person commented on my last post and mentioned Schrödinger's cat. I love smart people, and I'm not trying to be snarky saying that, I really do even though at times they intimidate me and make me feel inferior to them, which I am.

Anyway. I'd heard of Schrödinger's cat but was just dimly aware of what it is. A visit to Wikipedia has a good explanation of it but not one I could understand. Did you know that if you go to simple.wikipedia.org you can get a, duh, simple explanation of things? I didn't until today. Here's what that gave on

Erwin Schrödinger

Schrödinger's cat:

In simple terms, Schrödinger stated that if you place a cat and something that could kill the cat (a radioactive atom) in a box and sealed it, you would not know if the cat was dead or alive until you opened the box, so that until the box was opened, the cat was (in a sense) both "dead and alive."

If you're interested in quantum physics, this is worth learning more about, but in this case it was about my willful denial of focusing on the progression of the cancer now devouring my pelvis. The smart person agreed with my view of doing what I can to enjoy life with what I know now before getting results which will be five days from now, when I meet with my doctor.

I heard my parents and others say that it's better to know than not know things like that. I disagree in cases where knowing provides no benefit. It's the old question, if it were possible to know the date of your death, would you want to? Some would, some wouldn't. For much of my life, I'd have said I would. I'm not sure that's true now. Life with a gas gauge? No thank you.

Two asides on that, neither relevant, but I find them interesting:

• They still have the death penalty in Japan. They hang people, thought infrequently. The Japanese legal system operates with a logic I never understood, though it's not something I studied during the three years I lived there in the 1980s. What they don't do is tell the condemned person when the sentence will be carried out. It could be in a month, it could be, and often is, years later. What happens is they just come to your cell one morning and tell you that day's the day, go with them. Can you imagine living knowing that?
• You know how when you have business cards printed they give you more of them you'll ever use? The debunker James Randi once had a lot of them and just for fun he wrote the day's date and the message, "Today is the day I will die," and put it in his wallet. The idea was that if some random event killed him the people going through his effects would find the card and be amazed. I always thought that was pretty cool.

  

  James Randi.