Schrödinger's Relationship
Feb. 27th, 2013 03:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
babeinthewoodsAbout 48 hours ago, the phone o' the babe rang.
This, in and of itself isn't unusual. TheReaper, TheBoo, TheCurdleator, TheSugaryOne and others ring the phone o' the babe with regularity.
This time, when the phone rang though, the babe did not answer it with a cheerful "Heya babycakes, what's shakin' bacon?"
For the record, that IS how one answers the phone in babeland.
Oh no. I rejected the call.
In fact, I treated that call as though I had looked at my phone and saw a big, hairy-legged spider on it.
I jumped, screamed, panicked, flailed and threw it across the room as a matter of fact.
So, who was on the phone?
BoyfriendBoy.
After 31 days of absolute no contact, he called.
That's a full calendar month for those of you who prefer to think in terms like that
I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
No voicemail.
And so it happened. The first post-breakup contact from BoyfriendBoy.
Now, as some of you may know, this was both a wonderful relationship and the worst one imaginable.
When we were alone together it was easy to believe that I was beautiful and desired. That I was his. That he craved me.
That, as he said without any provocation from the babe, he loved me.
When we were with others, though, it was impossible to not think otherwise. I was not allowed to make physical contact. I was treated like one of the guys. I was the acknowledged booty call. He wouldn't add me to FB or any other social networking site. He didn't initiate date nights. He couldn't even muster up the compassion to text a fucking frownie face when I told him that I was in bed with a raging fever two days before Christmas.
And, so, in a blaze of unhappiness and anguish, it extinguished.
That call got me thinking, though. It got the wheels spinning.
That call is a practical application of Schrödinger's cat, the 1935 thought experiment where Schrödinger describes how one could, in principle, transpose the superposition of an atom to large-scale systems. He proposed a scenario with a cat in a sealed box, wherein the cat's life or death depended on the state of a subatomic particle. According to Schrödinger, the Copenhagen interpretation implies that the cat remains both alive and dead (to the universe outside the box) until the box is opened. Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-alive cats as a serious possibility; quite the reverse, the paradox is a classic reductio ad absurdum.
In 1957, Hugh Everett formulated the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which does not single out observation as a special process. In the many-worlds interpretation, both alive and dead states of the cat persist after the box is opened, but are decoherent from each other. In other words, when the box is opened, the observer and the already-dead cat split into an observer looking at a box with a dead cat, and an observer looking at a box with a live cat. But since the dead and alive states are decoherent, there is no effective communication or interaction between them.
And so, there I am. Having not answered the call, the cat remains both alive and dead, if one chooses to adhere to the Copenhagen interpretation of entanglement.
On the other hand, if one chooses to be a student of the many worlds interpretation, there are many worlds: one where I answered the phone and the cat died, one where I answered the phone and the cat lived...and one where there's a bunch of scientists in Copenhagen discussing dead and alive cats at the same time.
Should I have answered the call instead of treating it like it was radioactive waste?
I dunno.
Part of me wants to know if there's a dead cat in a box sitting in the room with me, but the other part wants to believe in the live kitty, happily sleeping.
Fucking Schrödinger.
This, in and of itself isn't unusual. TheReaper, TheBoo, TheCurdleator, TheSugaryOne and others ring the phone o' the babe with regularity.
This time, when the phone rang though, the babe did not answer it with a cheerful "Heya babycakes, what's shakin' bacon?"
For the record, that IS how one answers the phone in babeland.
Oh no. I rejected the call.
In fact, I treated that call as though I had looked at my phone and saw a big, hairy-legged spider on it.
I jumped, screamed, panicked, flailed and threw it across the room as a matter of fact.
So, who was on the phone?
BoyfriendBoy.
After 31 days of absolute no contact, he called.
That's a full calendar month for those of you who prefer to think in terms like that
I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
No voicemail.
And so it happened. The first post-breakup contact from BoyfriendBoy.
Now, as some of you may know, this was both a wonderful relationship and the worst one imaginable.
When we were alone together it was easy to believe that I was beautiful and desired. That I was his. That he craved me.
That, as he said without any provocation from the babe, he loved me.
When we were with others, though, it was impossible to not think otherwise. I was not allowed to make physical contact. I was treated like one of the guys. I was the acknowledged booty call. He wouldn't add me to FB or any other social networking site. He didn't initiate date nights. He couldn't even muster up the compassion to text a fucking frownie face when I told him that I was in bed with a raging fever two days before Christmas.
And, so, in a blaze of unhappiness and anguish, it extinguished.
That call got me thinking, though. It got the wheels spinning.
That call is a practical application of Schrödinger's cat, the 1935 thought experiment where Schrödinger describes how one could, in principle, transpose the superposition of an atom to large-scale systems. He proposed a scenario with a cat in a sealed box, wherein the cat's life or death depended on the state of a subatomic particle. According to Schrödinger, the Copenhagen interpretation implies that the cat remains both alive and dead (to the universe outside the box) until the box is opened. Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-alive cats as a serious possibility; quite the reverse, the paradox is a classic reductio ad absurdum.
In 1957, Hugh Everett formulated the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which does not single out observation as a special process. In the many-worlds interpretation, both alive and dead states of the cat persist after the box is opened, but are decoherent from each other. In other words, when the box is opened, the observer and the already-dead cat split into an observer looking at a box with a dead cat, and an observer looking at a box with a live cat. But since the dead and alive states are decoherent, there is no effective communication or interaction between them.
And so, there I am. Having not answered the call, the cat remains both alive and dead, if one chooses to adhere to the Copenhagen interpretation of entanglement.
On the other hand, if one chooses to be a student of the many worlds interpretation, there are many worlds: one where I answered the phone and the cat died, one where I answered the phone and the cat lived...and one where there's a bunch of scientists in Copenhagen discussing dead and alive cats at the same time.
Should I have answered the call instead of treating it like it was radioactive waste?
I dunno.
Part of me wants to know if there's a dead cat in a box sitting in the room with me, but the other part wants to believe in the live kitty, happily sleeping.
Fucking Schrödinger.
