Did you kill the cat?
There is a famous saying, “curiosity killed the cat”, occasionally followed by a rejoinder “but satisfaction brought it back.” It generally warns people of indulging in other’s affairs. The rejoinder may refer to the 9 lives of the cat(its a myth).
There was this guy who took a box and put a cat and a bomb in it. He devised the bomb in such a way that in an hour, it may or may not explode with equal chances like that of tossing a coin.(He inspired SAW movies, pretty sadistic person)
Why would he do that? Well, he wanted to prove to “some really smart people” wrong by killing a cat. These some people came up with a crazy notion about light as we see it. They wanted to know what light is. Is it matter, can we touch it or is it a wave, does it generate ripples when disturbed like the water waves do.
These were the people of science and hence respected what they observed, they couldn’t reach a consensus to either of them as light showed them both behaviours.
In the end they all sat down and decided, “you know what, its neither and both, a wave and a particle. It just choses to be one when need comes. Like when it hits your eyes, it choses to be a particle but when it passes through a prism, it acts as a wave just as a transformer decides when it wants to be a car to move around or when it wants to be a robot and needs to fight”. They all accepted it happily because it explained all of their observable experiments.
So when this guy put the cat in the box, he put the same question. If you open the box within an hour and if the cat was dead, would you have killed the cat?
According to all those smart people, the cat is both alive and dead until someone opens the box and checks it. So as soon you opened the box, the nature decided one of the outcomes at that very instant for the cat. The absurdity of the statement is that according to the cat, she always knew if she was alive or dead. She never knew of her having two states. How can two observers have two different notions of the same event. What if someone else is observing me observing the cat and that someone is the one who actually decides to kill the cat when I open the box.
So who killed the cat, was it the bomb, was it you or was it just the curiosity or maybe someone else watching you all (another saw movie)?
P.S. This cat does remind me of the black cat in Coraline who can easily pass through multi dimensions. My friends say its grammatically correct to refer a cat as “it” but I prefer to call it she. This guy actually din’t kill the cat. He just thought it all over. This is a hot topic in a field of physics called Quantum Mechanics. It states that everything in nature is in one of the two states(particle and atom).
Isn’t it the same for us humans at the macroscopic level, we show duality too. We are both good and bad, right and wrong, just and unfair. We just chose to be one at any particular time. Our choice makes us one.
I never really appreciated Physics during college but just for today I researched a lot about this and I still don’t understand the dual nature of light. There is this fascinating video you can watch to understand in a simple manner about a cool concept called Quantum Entaglement.
