Schrödinger's Cat
(by Mike Farman)

Supine on the carpet in a twitching dream,
purring over Special Kitty
or pawing spiders on the windowsill,
who'd have guessed
your slightly bulging, furry frame
is built entirely
out of question marks?

At least one person had this figured out:
Lewis Carroll had you melt away
bequeathing as your calling-card
the vestige of a knowing grin
acknowledging
that cats, spiders, people, everything
solid and dependable
are simply fragments of a cosmic smile.

So let's all cheer up and remind ourselves
how intolerable we'd find the world
without the shadow of uncertainty
and, all in all, it's time to celebrate
that God in his infinite random wisdom
decided to play dice.

Quantum Suicide

A thought experiment, proposed by Schrödinger
Dead or living? The impossible question lingers.
Into the box goes the creature. It's purely hypothetical.
Like the thought experiment itself -- it's all theoretical.
Connected to the box of unknown mass,
An apparatus with a nucleus and a can of poison gas.
The scientists, hoping to with knowledge be empowered,
Know the 50-50 chance the nucleus decays within the hour.
Either way, they'll try to know the hypothetical kitty's status:
If the nucleus decayed, a particle emits and triggered the deadly apparatus.
But on the other hand, maybe no poison, and the cat survived
Naturally, you'd figure, the cat would still be alive.
Theoretical physics, they said, always has its perks,
Even when a quantum monkey wrench gets thrown into the works.
It's nothing as simple as nuclear fusion or even fission
It says that the nucleus, unobserved, is described as superposition.
Nothing's straightforward, anymore, I'm afraid.
Theory says that nucleus is simultaneously both decayed and undecayed.
When the box is opened, what does the experimenter see? Fancy that...
Nothing more than just a living, or no-longer, cat.
But in theory, here's part of the famous paradox:
Unobserved, the cat's both dead and alive inside that box.

Now along came some other people with different interpretations and another thought.
Knowing that more answers to the question are still sought.
They propose quantum suicide, saying "Think outside that box and think bigger."
"Put a hypothetical physicist in front of a gun, which might be triggered."
The idea is strange, and somewhat unattractive.
But that hypothetical gun might be triggered by the decay of an atom radioactive.
To determine whether or not any hopes for the experiment will be fulfilled,
There's a 50-50 chance the physicist in question will be killed.
Copenhagen's interpretation says that eventually the gun will go off and kill the guy.
Many-worlds says he'll be split into one world in which he'll live and another where he'll die,
And after many runs of the experiment, there'll be many worlds, the theory insists.
In the worlds where he dies, the physicist will cease to exist.
But from the perspective of the non-dead physicist, the experiment will continue running,
Without his ceasing to exist, which is a revelation quite stunning.
Why? At each branch, he'll only be able to observe the result in the world in which he is alive,
And if many-worlds is correct, the physicist will never notice that he seems to die.
Unfortunately, he'll never be able to report the results, because from an outsider's point of view
Probabilities will be the same as to whether many-worlds or Copenhagen is right and true.

So the answer may never be known or written
And we might never really know what makes up Schrödinger's paradoxical kitten.