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The story of Schroedinger's cat (an epic poem)

Cecil, you're my final hope
Of finding out the true Straight Dope
For I have been reading of Schroedinger's cat
But none of my cats are at all like that.
This unusual animal (so it is said)
Is simultaneously live and dead!
What I don't understand is just why he
Can't be one or other, unquestionably.
My future now hangs in between eigenstates.
In one I'm enlightened, the other I ain't.
If you understand, Cecil, then show me the way
And rescue my psyche from quantum decay.
But if this queer thing has perplexed even you,
Then I will and won't see you in Schroedinger's zoo.
--Randy F., Chicago

Dear Randy:

Schroedinger, Erwin! Professor of physics!
Wrote daring equations! Confounded his critics!
(Not bad, eh? Don't worry. This part of the verse
Starts off pretty good, but it gets a lot worse.)
Win saw that the theory that Newton'd invented
By Einstein's discov'ries had been badly dented.
What now? wailed his colleagues. Said Erwin, "Don't panic,
No grease monkey I, but a quantum mechanic.
Consider electrons. Now, these teeny articles
Are sometimes like waves, and then sometimes like particles.
If that's not confusing, the nuclear dance
Of electrons and suchlike is governed by chance!
No sweat, though--my theory permits us to judge
Where some of 'em is and the rest of 'em was."
Not everyone bought this. It threatened to wreck
The comforting linkage of cause and effect.
E'en Einstein had doubts, and so Schroedinger tried
To tell him what quantum mechanics implied.
Said Win to Al, "Brother, suppose we've a cat,
And inside a tube we have put that cat at--
Along with a solitaire deck and some Fritos,
A bottle of Night Train, a couple mosquitoes
(Or something else rhyming) and, oh, if you got 'em,
One vial prussic acid, one decaying ottom
Or atom--whatever--but when it emits,
A trigger device blasts the vial into bits
Which snuffs our poor kitty. The odds of this crime
Are 50 to 50 per hour each time.
The cylinder's sealed. The hour's passed away. Is
Our pussy still purring--or pushing up daisies?
Now, you'd say the cat either lives or it don't
But quantum mechanics is stubborn and won't.
Statistically speaking, the cat (goes the joke),
Is half a cat breathing and half a cat croaked.
To some this may seem a ridiculous split,
But quantum mechanics must answer, "Tough @#&!
We may not know much, but one thing's fo' sho':
There's things in the cosmos that we cannot know.
Shine light on electrons--you'll cause them to swerve.
The act of observing disturbs the observed--
Which ruins your test. But then if there's no testing
To see if a particle's moving or resting
Why try to conjecture? Pure useless endeavor!
We know probability--certainty, never.'
The effect of this notion? I very much fear
'Twill make doubtful all things that were formerly clear.
Till soon the cat doctors will say in reports,
"We've just flipped a coin and we've learned he's a corpse."'
So saith Herr Erwin. Quoth Albert, "You're nuts.
God doesn't play dice with the universe, putz.
I'll prove it!" he said, and the Lord knows he tried--
In vain--until fin'ly he more or less died.
Win spoke at the funeral: "Listen, dear friends,
Sweet Al was my buddy. I must make amends.
Though he doubted my theory, I'll say of this saint:
Ten-to-one he's in heaven--but five bucks says he ain't."

--CECIL ADAMS
 
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Just to be a dork, I'll note that I once saw similarities between Schrodinger's Cat and Hegel's concept of Reflection from his Science of Logic. This is, believe it or not, one of the more straight forward concepts in Hegel's Science (assuming I got it right). To wit (and with a description of Deety's cat) (only the bolded part is relevant to the cat, the rest is a clarifying introduction to why Hegel's concept of Reflection is being dicussed with the cat, if anyone's curious):

Hegel begins his section on Positing Reflection by summarizing the properties of Illusory Being. Hegel then writes that the, ". . . self related negativity of essence. . . is just as much sublated negativity as it is negativity. . ." Professor David Gray Carlson wrote in Hegel on Essence and Reflection that "Immediacy, then, is an ideal moment-- a recollection of what once was but now is not." The immediacy here, which is negativity, was previously sublated and as Essence recaptures this negativity in a determination of itself, it is back where it belongs, within Essence. Essence has posited equality with itself and used its positing for self-determination. As Essence determines itself by positing, essentially, itself, the positing is self-sublated. As this positing is both negative, or that which it (Essence) is not, and yet is also equal with Essence, already sublated in Essence, and determinative of Essence, it is at once not itself and itself. Hegel writes, "It consists, therefore, in being itself and not itself and that too, in a single unity."

Hegel specifies that, "But this coincidence is not a transition of the negation into equality-with-self as into its otherness: on the contrary, reflection is transition as sublating of the transition; for reflection is immediate coincidence of the negative with itself." As Essence posits out what it is not, which is precisely what it is, it shows itself to be that. Essence is its own self-negativity and positing its own self-negativity therefore is only showing what it is. It is, therefore, not positing an other; it is being determined by its own nature, by itself. Hegel calls this "self-reflection."

As there is no other, there is nothing for the reflection to move to and from. Hegel describes this as a "returning movement," which is to say that with no other available, or posited, the immediacy, which is the negativity of Essence, what it is not, returns. Less intuitively, this appears to be Hegel saying also that the returning movement lacks movement. The positing of the immediate negativity reveals only that it is Essence. The act of positing the negativity "elsewhere" shows that the negativity resides "at home," it is sublated.

Reflection, however, does have an other: "Reflection, as sublating the negative, is a sublating of its other, of immediacy." Immediacy is the other of Reflection. The act of Reflection is to say that the immediacy is not immediate, and to declare the immediacy to be part of itself, and through this Reflection sublate the immediacy with its own being.

Hegel says that as the negative is coincident with Essence, and as Essence is positing this negative as coincident, and positing, further, that it will sublate its positing of the negative as it is coincident with itself, that this act comprises a presupposition. In his words, "Or immediacy, as a returning movement, is only the negative of itself, only this, to be not immediacy; but reflection is the sublating of the negative of itself, it is a coincidence with itself, it therefore sublates its positing, and since it is positing it sublates its positing, it is presupposing."

This passage is important as the nature of the presupposing in Positing Reflection differentiates Positing Reflection from External Reflection, allowing for Determining Reflection. This passage is, perhaps surprisingly, an example of Hegel writing in a readily understandable way. Although the process of the passage is long, the method and its components can be readily identified. First, it is necessary to explain the use of the word "coincidence." Hegel uses this word to show an identification of the posited negative with Essence. This merely describes Essence positing a negativity which it in fact is. Reflection, due to this coincidence, allows Essence to see its negative as itself. Essence than reflects the negative back into itself, depriving it of its immediacy. This sublation is Reflection. However, as Essence presumes that this positing, of its negative, will be sublated by itself through Reflection as a thing coincident with itself, it is presupposing that this is what should be. Its presumption that the positing is itself, and thus sublatable, is this presupposition. Hegel says this is a "negative of the negative as negative." He also uses this comment to say that the action is a presupposition. The meaning of the negatives can be seen as follows: Essence, in positing its negative, is positing what it is not. This is the first negative, that act of disassociation. The second negative is the negative quality of what is being posited, the nature of what was posited was a negative, a what something is not. Finally, this is shown not to be true, as Essence is indeed that negative; therefore, the result is negative that Essence is not the negative. Hence, a negative of a negative as negative. Once again, Essence determining, through Reflection, that it is what it posits it is not, or that it is not true that it is not the negative of itself, requires a presupposition in that it is presupposing what it, Essence, in fact is. Essence is presupposing its own self equality with that which it is not. In doing so, "[T]he return of essence is its self-repulsion." In finding self-equality with what it is not, Essence finds equality with its own non-existence. It finds existence in the act of being not something. Carlson writes that, "In effect, Essence is nothing but the statement, 'I am not Being.' Non-being is therefore Essence's mode of being."

Hegel writes that, "What is thus found only comes to be through being left behind." Hegel shows that in order for Essence to be self equal, to achieve identity, it requires the act of self-repulsion. When Essence posits that which it is not, its negative, this immediacy is sublated into Essence. This sublation through Essence's Reflection is a kind of realization of self. The potential for self-equality, or independent identity, was already within Essence, but in order for this self-equality to be realized it had to be repelled and sublated. As with many of Hegel's concepts, this idea causes examples from the world of physics to jump into my mind. One such example would be that of Schrodinger's Cat. In this famous imagined, not completed, experiment, created by Erwin Schrodinger, a cat is placed in a box. In some form or another, also in the box are a bottle of poison and a radioactive nucleus. This nucleus is in a dual state where it is both decayed and not decayed. If it is decayed then a particle is emitted which activates a receiving mechanism which disperses the poison gas, killing the cat. However, according to quantum mechanics, the cat is neither dead nor alive until an observer checks, as the state of the nucleus, decayed or not decayed, is only a probability and not an actuality until observed. Many theories have been posited to describe what really is happening in this situation. Here I will use it in its simplest form, along with another theory, to reproduce Essence's requirement of positing its negative in order to attain identity.

Similar to Schrodinger's Cat is what Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." This is the concept that when two subatomic particles, nuclei or electrons perhaps, are created in a collision, one of the pair of particles (say electrons) will have one direction of spin, and the other will have a rotation in the opposition direction. Neither rotation is actual until observed. So, if these electrons are separated by a great distance, observing one will necessarily determine the spin of the other at a speed faster than light: spooky action at a distance. The important concept from this famous idea is that of entanglement, that the particles must have opposite spin and so the determination of one's spin, through observation, simultaneously determines the spin of another. In the above experiments the life of the cat and the spin of the particle may be thought to exist in some form, but they are not real, they cannot have effect, until they are observed. Similarly, Essence cannot fulfill itself and become self-equal until it repels itself away and sublates the repulsion. Until that point the self-equality of Essence is inherent but not realized. In order for Schrodinger's Cat or spooky action at a distance to more accurately mirror Essence's predicament the radioactive nucleus in Schrodinger's Cat and the entangled electron in spooky action at a distance would need to observe itself. In doing so it would become what it is. While not perfect analogies, something in these experiments is self-observing rather than self-repelling, and the particles are in two states as much as an undetermined one, the analogies do serve to illuminate the concept of something inherent requiring action to be actualized.

Essence determines itself by expelling that which it is not, which ends up being an Illusory Being. As it is illusory, it is something only posited to be. Essence, through Reflection, sees this positing as what it is, not being, and therefore sublates the positing and becomes what it is, achieving self-equality. Hence, it comes to be by being left behind.


Edit: btw, to the extent anyone is interested in reading Hegel's Science of Logic, I am about to dive back into it, as I didn't get through it last time. It is a book that often needs "talked" through, and it would be ideal to know somebody else truding through it so that concepts can be bounced back and forth and eventually understood. . .
 
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