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Embrace your ignorance
It is OK not to know stuff for certain, especially when things are uncertain
Once upon a time, there was a cat. It was a hypothetical cat, owned and imagined by Erwin Schrödinger, a 20th century quantum physicist. Dr Schrödinger had placed the cat in a box, together with a bottle containing cyanide, a hammer connected to a Geiger counter (an instrument to measure radioactivity), and some radioactive material. He had then sealed the box and waited for an hour to pass. The Geiger counter in the box could detect the radioactive material, but there was so little of it that the chance of this happening over the course of one hour was exactly 50/50. If it did, it would release the hammer, which would then shatter the flask with the poison, leading to the death of the cat. Now, without opening the box, could we say whether the cat was alive or dead?
No. As Schrödinger’s famous (and somewhat lugubrious) thought experiment illustrates (see this video for enlightenment), until the box is opened, and we know whether or not the poison was released, the cat is in a kind of indeterminate state — both alive and dead, or indeed neither. Such indeterminacy is not unusual in the field of quantum physics, and quantum physicists happily deal with it. However, in our ordinary world, with objects that are much larger than the tiny particles they work…
