schrodinger's cat is dead, you guys

I. "One Cannot Get Around the Assumption of Reality"
Schrodinger's cat, famously suspended in a quantum superposition until observed, was devised as an argumentum ad absurdum. While it's become the de facto example for trying to explain quantum mechanics in movies and books and I guess maybe high school physics, Schrodinger himself proposed the example as an objection. "Uh, if you leave a cat alone in a box without food or water for a certain length of time, it will definitely die. Fancy math aside, please feed Frisky." Einstein thought the objection was robust:

You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality, if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. [...] Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation. 

And yet! We always hear about possible worlds and quantum superpositions because they're mathematically possible; there is something symbolically real about the cat's being both dead and alive until observed. I'm way out of my depth here, but what I love about these paradoxes is exactly what Einstein highlights (implicitly): what exists both is and is not what it appears to be.

This is possibly the hot take which defines me most essentially, but I think Schrodinger's original intent holds up wonderfully. At the same time I also think that the paradoxes of physics (resolvable at some point in the future, possibly) continually reinforce the sensibility of the mystic. What we learn contradicts what we know we know, but what we have always known (boxed cat is dead cat) remains true in the face of what is learned. That's mystery, man. If this one is resolved, expect us simply to face another.

II. Speaking of Science-y Things
Hannah Arendt with an appropriate quote the week we landed more litter on Mars. It's a long quote, I know!, but it's so good. It's really good. You have time to read this quote. I believe in you.

In other words, notions such as life, or man, or science, or knowledge are pre-scientific by definition, and the question is whether or not the actual development of science which has led to the conquest of terrestrial space and to the invasion of the space of the universe has changed these notions to such an extent that they no longer make sense. For the point of the matter is, of course, that modern science — no matter what its origins and original goals — has changed and reconstructed the world we live in so radically that it could be argued that the layman and the humanist, still trusting their common sense and communicating in everyday language, are out of touch with reality; that they understand only what appears but not what is behind appearances (as though trying to understand a tree without taking the roots into account); and that their questions and anxieties are simply caused by ignorance and therefore are irrelevant. [...]

This division between the scientist and the layman, however, is very far from the truth. The fact is not merely that the scientist spends more than half of his life in the same world of sense perception, of common sense, and of everyday language as his fellow citizens, but that he has come in his own privileged field of activity to a point where the naïve questions and anxieties of the layman have made themselves felt very forcefully, albeit in a different manner. The scientist has not only left behind the layman with his limited understanding; he has left behind a part of himself and his own power of understanding, which is still human understanding, when he goes to work in the laboratory and begins to communicate in mathematical language.

III. America Is No Longer New
There is something wonderful, but startling, about reading nonfiction from or about the sixties and seventies. So much of our current strife - globalism, imperialism, racism, religious freedom, feminism, free-market greed - is a recognizable iteration (if not a repetition) of what has come before. Likewise, the Bernie left is an amazing re-tread of the nicer elements of New Deal democracy and 1920s socialist organizing (from what little I've read; Ragtime by Doctorow, basically). I'm not sure if this continuity is comforting or depressing as hell, but for some reason I keep coming back to the former. Possibly this is for a reason almost sentimental: allies and wisdom exist across space and time, which suggests a wisdom that is dependable despite the toxic trends no one can avoid in one's own culture.

Anyway, Richard Hofstadter's essay on the Paranoid Style of American Politics is very famous and still worth reading, especially if you're semi-politically illiterate, such as me: 

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

VI. Opinion
None. I'm out. I'm saving all my opinions for my prayers. May God improve them one by one so that I can tell everyone how wrong they are with, you know, divine success.

I'm kidding. I love you all. Happy almost-Advent.