Schrödinger's cat

And now for a brief journey into the bizarre world of quantum physics... and the promise of a spiritual bent at the end. I've blogged about this before, but I want to come back to it.

Schrödinger's cat.

Schrödinger was a physicist in the early 1900s who proposed that the quantum universe was a very strange place indeed. He found that quantum particles had no definite state until they were observed. They were all possible states until they were observed. He used the example of a cat in a box to make his point in case.

He asked that we believe a subatomic particle was a cat, in a box. You don't know if the cat is dead or alive inside the box until you open it to find out. But the real mindf*#% was that, according to quantum mechanics, the cat would be both dead AND alive until you observed it - and that by observing it you would be sealing its fate and it would become one or the other forever.

Now this information is interesting to think about in all kinds of ways - but my favourite way of thinking about it is in the personal sense - that this is true of us on a larger scale. The entire universe exists in a state of endless possibilities. We are not simply the one thing we think we are - but by thinking we are that one thing (by observing ourselves, we create that reality.

But we are made up of particles that do not exist as any one thing, they exist as everything - and they bounce in and out of existence by the second.

The next time I find myself saying I can't or I'm not.. I'll have to remember that I can and I am... unless I decide that I can't or I'm not. Because we are infinite until we decide we're not.

I'll leave you with this daily gem from Lolcats which inspired my post today: