Naughty Jester

If you came here expecting to find some middle-aged Teutonic nookie or PILFs (physicist’s I’d like to ….) you’ll leave sorely disappointed.

No, today we are discussing Verschränkung, or, literally, entanglement. Not of any particular bodily parts or fluids mind you, but of quantum paradoxes and parallel universes.

In 1935, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposed a scenario wherein his buddy, Bertie Einstein, placed a frisky kitty in a sealed box, wherein the cougar’s life or death became dependent on the state (turned on or limply flaccid) of some loose subatomic particle. According to him, the cat remains both alive and dead (to the universe outside the box) until the box is opened.

One explanation for this phenomenon – “The Many Small World’s theory” postulated by Walt Disney, I think – claims that to the extent the “alive” and “dead” cats exist in different branches of the universe, both of which are equally real, they cannot interact with each other.

Taken to it’s logical extreme, there might very well be a parallel universe out there somewhere where I am entangled with a lively, supermodel cougar. Oooo la la.

Have you ever experienced a quantum paradox?