Schrödinger's War Criminal

Theoretical physicists condemn President Trump

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

The American Association of Theoretical Physicists (AATP) has issued this statement in opposition to President Trump’s actions in Iran:

We, the AATP, condemn the war in Iran on humanitarian, legal, and constitutional grounds. However, these matters fall outside the Association's area of direct knowledge, and we defer to relevant experts. We write today regarding a separate matter.

In 1935, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposed a thought experiment in which a cat is placed inside a sealed box with a radioactive atom that may or may not decay. Until the box is opened, the cat exists in a state of quantum superposition — simultaneously alive and dead. Schrödinger was trying to make a point about the limits of quantum theory, because surely a thing cannot be both alive and dead at the same time. The matter has long been considered settled.

Unfortunately, this experiment has recently been complicated by the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, who for the last several weeks has existed in a previously unobserved quantum state: a war criminal who has not yet committed his crimes. We have termed this newly observed state “Schrödinger’s War Criminal.”

The crimes in question are specific. Trump has threatened to destroy every bridge in Iran. He has threatened to destroy every power plant, as well. On Tuesday morning, he posted that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” A temporary ceasefire was agreed to Tuesday evening, but from a moral perspective, the situation remains horrifying. And from a theoretical perspective, Iran remains in a superposition. Because we do not know if or when Trump will follow through on his repeated threats, their civilization exists as both destroyed and not destroyed — an entire nation of cats-in-boxes that we do not have the post-graduate manpower to fully understand.

The Association also notes, with professional displeasure, that Trump has complicated the observer problem. In the original experiment, opening the box collapses the superposition because the act of observation forces the cat into a binary reality. But in our current “experiment,” we are all helpless observers to the whims of an unchecked madman, and it simply feels like reality is collapsing around us.

(We have submitted a paper on this phenomenon. It was rejected.)

It is worth noting that this new line of inquiry has led the Association to revise its view of Erwin Schrödinger’s original cat. The cat's superposition, we now believe, is not a paradox but an achievement. Undisturbed by observation, the cat exists in an extremely stable quantum state: shut away in a box, unaware that any of this shit is happening.

The cat is not subject to collapse, nor is it subject to Truth Social. By our current measurements, this is the optimal quantum condition.

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