File this under: Things Not Quite Topical Enough to Put in the Podcast.
President Trump’s tweets about collusion may serve as a decent example of the "Schrödinger’s Cat" thought experiment. And we don’t even have to kill (or not kill) a cat in the process!
Trump has regularly denied collusion via his official Twitter account - even going so far as to state that his lawyers “have shown conclusively that there was no Collusion with Russia.” So, let's associate “no collusion” with a “living cat.”
But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
For those who don’t know of the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, I’ll attempt to summarize and simplify for you. You have a cat and you have a contraption with the capability to kill this cat. For reasons I can’t even begin to fathom, you place both the cat and the contraption into a steel box, and seal it up. The contraption has a less than 100% and greater than 0% chance of activating over the period of confinement. You allow some time to pass, then, without opening the box you ask yourself, “is the cat alive or dead?”
Schrödinger suggested that - until you actually open the box and observed the situation - the cat must be simultaneously alive and dead. (Einstein wrote to Schrödinger with his own example that referenced an unstable keg of gunpowder that is both exploded and unexploded, but this didn’t catch on, perhaps due to the lack of cats of the living-dead variety.)
Now we can go back to the Trumpian example at the start. But let’s swap out Schrödinger’s sealed steel box for the metaphorical 'black box' of the Mueller investigation - which isn’t a stretch as both are opaque and neither is prone to leaking. Next, we can exchange Schrödinger’s cat for the guilt or innocence of the Trump campaign as it pertains to colluding with Russia. Now - before we open this box - we ask ourselves, “did the Trump campaign collude with Russia?”
By Schrödinger’s logic, and regardless of what Trump's detractors say, Trump’s statement that there is no collusion isn’t exactly wrong. Further, those who claim Trump is guilty of collusion are also not wrong. To all of us not inside the box that makes up the Mueller investigation it both true that there is collusion, and true that there is no collusion. Only when the Mueller box is unsealed will the two conflicting states resolve into one.
This, of course, will not prevent pundits, prognosticators, and our President from continuing to proclaim that their perspective is the true one and anyone who disagrees is an idiot.
So, if it doesn’t shut anyone up, why did I write this post?
Honestly, I’m not sure. Maybe if you can properly cite the basics of Schrödinger’s Cat in your response, you might at least convince yourself that you’re not the one who’s the idiot.
