Michael Wolraich's picture

    Middle East Out of the Box: Schrodinger's Cat is Dead

    There is a cat in a box with a flask of poison. The random decay of a radioactive isotope is rigged to shatter the flask and kill the cat. We don't know if the cat is alive or dead.

    According to the well-known quantum paradox of Schrodinger's cat, the cat is neither alive nor dead (or both alive and dead) until someone opens the box to find out, which disrupts the quantum uncertainty and resolves the cat's fate.

    The citizens of the Middle East have long lived in a box of uncertainty. In Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Jordan, Algeria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, the people weren't free, to be sure, but neither did they live in chains, or so it seemed. Their monarchs were enlightened...on occasion. Their presidents held elections...which sometimes even included opposition candidates. Their newspapers reported...within limits.

    Outside of the box, no one pressed too hard to resolve the uncertainty. We knew that Egypt wasn't America or Europe, but maybe it was just getting there slowly. Even Colonel Gaddafi and his sons seemed to be leaning shyly towards liberalization. At least, we could agree, Egypt was not North Korea. It wasn't a dictatorship-dictatorship.

    But it turns out that the "quantum uncertainty" of global politics existed only in our minds. There are only two types of nations, democracies and dictatorships. Egypt was a dictatorship. So was Tunisia. So is Bahrain, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Jordan, Algeria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

    The youth revolutions of the past months finally opened the box. We can no longer pretend that the cat is neither alive nor dead. The dictators have been exposed one by one as corrupt megalomaniacal despots despised by their people. They have been forced to either abdicate or else throw off the cloak of the enlightened autocrat and expose the instruments upon which every dictator's authority invariably rests: guns, tanks, planes, and prisons.

    The cat is dead. Long live the cat.

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    Ah but Schrodinger's cat is either dead or alive depending on the universe one inhabits. In one universe it is dead while in another it is alive.

    Unfortunately there are people that inhabit very different universes right here on this planet.

    The cat is dead. Long live the cat. Depending on your universe.


    The most common quantum philosophy is that the cat is in a quantum superposition of being both dead and alive, and that the act of observing the cat causes the quantum superposition's wave function to collapse such that the cat becomes either dead (you killed it!) or alive (you rescued it!). An alternative philosophy is that, as you suggest, the cat is alive in one universe and dead in another, but that you are simultaneously occupying both universes. In that philosophy, the act of observing the cat causes your existence to diverge so that one of you is in one universe (with the dead cat), and the other of you is in the second universe (with the live cat). Adopting that multiverse philosophy requires that the cat is always both dead and alive, albeit in two different universes. (The universes are also able to interact, for individuals who exist in both at the same time.)


    ROTFLMAO...This is also true.


    Sure. Whatever.

    But why has no one ever asked the CAT how he felt about the whole thing, eh...?

    Imo, the theory is just a rationalization of Erwin's pathological hatred of felines...

    http://www.threadbombing.com/data/media/1/schrodinger.png


    You believe in Schrodinger's cat but not God.  

    Now that is either very funny or makes perfect sense depending on how you look at it.

    :D


    Well, fwiw, I don't believe in either, but find both of them to be useful constructs on occasion. ;)


    You sound pretty damn sure of your self. Wink



    Nah, he's dead


    But do we have to bomb the cat?


    Na...the cat is already bombed. Too much katnip.




    I'd worry about the Eagle

    The eagle will rise again - The Alan Parsons Project

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94yc7zMpwoM&feature=related 

    The Ottoman Empire……. The Eagle is rising

    http://www.worldwar1gallery.com/politicalcartoons/index5.html

     

    The Alan Parsons Project - In The Lap Of The Gods

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohE76gJx0xI&feature=fvwrel

    May Be a Price To Pay - Alan Parsons Project

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3glsF5wJS6Q&feature=related


    Those dictators may be corrupt megalomaniacal despots, but they're our corrupt megalomaniacal despots.


    Kinda sorta. It's more like we adopted them. I also included Iran because I believe that Iranians have been living in the same box. George W. may have put Iran in the "axis of evil" with Iraq and North Korea, but I don't think that most people in the world bought it.


    Syria's Alawite minority dictatorship is not beholden to us, just as Iran's dictatorship is not beholden to us, and just as Algeria's and Sudan's dictators are not beholden to us.  I think this is an important point to understand and accept.  To suggest otherwise could be the product of a mindset that we the progressives or we of "the left" often accuse our conservative friends of having, namely believing that everything evolves around we the Americans. 


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