Friday 8 July 2011

The other day at Schrödingers Assembly, the theory was ...

... proven correct [6th July 2011].

The original theory ...
In the mid-1930s the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposed a thought experiment to highlight how crazy quantum mechanics was. He suggested taking a box in which we place a cat, some lethal poison and a radioactive source. According to quantum mechanics we cannot say, unless we are checking, whether a radioactive atom has broken apart, or decayed, within a given time, so we must describe it as having both decayed and not decayed at the same time. Only when we check do we force it to be one or the other.
Inside Schrödinger’s box, the experiment is designed so that any decayed atom will have spat out a particle that triggers the release of the poison, killing the cat. Since the cat, said Schrödinger, is also made up of atoms (albeit trillions of them) then it too is presumably subject to the laws of quantum mechanics. So, until we open the box to look, we must describe the cat as being both dead and alive at the same time. Only when we open the box do we force everything inside into one or other state.
... courtesy The Times.

Likewise at the Welsh Assembly its membership demonstrated its ability to exists in two states at any one time.

When it voted to reinstate Liberal Democrat Aled Roberts, a man who was disqualified from standing in the last election by virtue of his employment, the membership existed in a state of "lawmaking" and "lawbreaking" at the same time, Schrödinger's Assembly.

Those Assembly members who voted in favour were not strong enough to represent the electorate of Wales, they forgot that we have to obey the law even when it is a bad law. The Assembly would have better spent its time having an early holiday, that way it would not have made an ass of itself.

2 comments:

  1. Really Aled Roberts should be suspended until it is dicovered whether or not he told the truth when he claimed to have accessed out-of-date material on a Welsh-language web site.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Gwilym, I wonder what the agents were doing when he was breaking the rules, I wonder if we might use the defence "I didn't realise I was breaking the law"...

    ... just thinking aloud.

    ReplyDelete