Have you seen the paper?

One thing that hasn't changed by moving to Miami is my constant struggle for delivery of the New York Times paper. I'm not asking for a lot, I just want the Sunday paper, just once a week so I can sit down and attempt to get a heads up on the next fiasco.

Anyway, every Sunday I get up and go to the driveway and I keep my fingers crossed that it's there.

This morning, laying in bed, I thought it was a lot like the thought experiment known as Schrödinger's Cat.

So... in simple terms:  A cat, a flask of poison, and a  radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.

Anyway…

So I'm laying in bed and Im thinking that right now, right here as I lay in bed, the newspaper is definitely there laying on the ground waiting for me to scoop it up, get a comfy spot on the couch and read it…

…except the moment I actually get out there, I will collapse the superposition (the possibility that it is both there and not there) into the reality of it not being there.

And that means I won't get my paper again…and that makes me cry.

But it probably also makes Erwin Schrödinger smile.

Cartoon is the sole property of the very funny Mike Jacobsen of SeeMikeDraw.com