Sigmund Slays as Quantum Icon

Sigmund channels his inner cat

Any performer would be challenged by the role.

You have to be a cat. 

Ok, Sigmund can do that.  He’s been doing it all his life.

You have to be a living cat.

Ok, still good.

And you also have to be a dead cat. 

A little more of a stretch, but not too much.  Sometimes Sigmund is so lazy and serene that he looks like he could be dead.  It’s one of his many talents.

But now you have to be dead and alive at the same time. 

Hmm.  That’s a genuine acting challenge, but if there’s any animal that can pull it off, it is certainly a cat.

Didn’t you ever hear of the Cheshire Cat?  He made a whole career of being there and not there, often at the same time. 

Didn’t you ever see the musical Cats?  Never mind.  Don’t see that.

Didn’t you ever read the quirky book of poems by T. S. Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats?  Eliot’s cats have a lovely habit of teetering along an ontological threshold between real and fantastical, existent and apparitional, present and elsewhere.

Didn’t you ever hear about the nine lives of cats?  Where’s the cat between one life and another?  You know, after he’s been flattened by a self-driving Tesla in Life 7 but before he blips back into existence for Life 8? 

Exactly.   

Haven’t you ever known a cat?

They’re not exactly falling over themselves to conform to your wishes and expectations (ie, they are not dogs), be those wishes/expectations behavioral or ontological.

So if there’s one animal that can play the role of Schrodinger’s Cat, it has to be a cat.

I know what you’re thinking.  Of course it has to be a cat.  It’s Schodinger’s flipping CAT, f’r chrissakes.

But it’s more than that.

Schrodinger’s Rat or Schrodinger’s Dog or Schrodinger’s Fern would hit different.

It is unlikely that one of these or any other organisms could play the role to such perfection.

After all, as Erwin Schrodinger explained to Albert Einstein in a 1935 letter, it is absurd to think that any creature could be both alive and dead – existent and nonexistent – at the same time.  If you stick the animal in a shoebox with a piece of uranium and a vial of poison gas and a device for breaking the vial if the uranium does or does not emit an electron within a certain span of time, as long as the lid of the box is closed, it is impossible to say whether the cat has been killed or not.  Quantum weirdness insists that the only way to tell whether the cat is dead or alive is to take the lid off the box.  Then your own status as a human (not feline) observer collapses the wave function.  Before the unboxing, the cat is stranded in a phase state of quantum incoherence, neither and both alive nor/and dead, just the way a cat was meant to be.

Schrodinger intended his speculative Cat to illustrate the absurdity of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum reality, the hypothesis that quantum events neither happened nor did not happen until they were perceived by a (human, not feline) observer. 

But, if you’ve ever owned a cat, you know that cats never do what you tell them to do.

Schrodinger’s cat went on to defy its master and to prowl through the 20^th century as the mascot and felinification of quantum weirdness.  Rather than illustrating the untenability of the Copenhagen Interpretation, Schrodinger’s Cat perversely emblematized its plausibility, at least as far as cats are concerned. 

Describing his decision to cast his cat Sigmund in the role of Schrodinger’s Cat for his recent Lunch & Learn presentation, Dr. Randy Laist explains, “Sure, I could have gotten one of ten thousand images of Schrodinger’s Cat from the internet for my PowerPoint slide, or generated some shloppy AI piece of crap, but then I realized that Schrodinger’s Cat was right here purring on my lap, and a star was born.”

Dr. Laist, Sigmund's human

Sigmund’s job was to channel the philosophical import of existential-ontological ambiguity, all while seeming natural and nonchalant about it. 

Based on the response of the attendees at the Lunch & Learn event, Sigmund nailed this feat of dramatic impersonation, sticking the landing with all fours, in the classic cat way.

Dr. Laist populated his Lunch & Learn talk with brilliant scholarly insights about the multiverse, postmodernism, narratology, and the prospect of an emancipatory heuristic revolution in human self-understanding, but Sigmund handily stole the show.  The Q&A session was dominated by questions about Sigmund and reflections on the Lunch & Learners’ own cats and whether those cats might be capable of violating fundamental ontological categories.

Informed about the popular reaction to his debut performance, Sigmund casually stretched his spine and phased into and out of existence.

A method actor.

A consummate thespian.

The Lunch & Learn series is supported by the University of Bridgeport's College of Science and Society for the purpose of disseminating faculty scholarship and cultivating interdisciplinary discourse.