another way to skin a cat

So you may have seen or heard discussion of 'Schrodinger's Cat' and wondered what it was. Well let me tell you.

Erwin Schrodinger, while famous for his children's stories about cats (not really) is actually more famous for his equation, aka Schrodinger's equation. It is rivaled only by Einstein's theory of relativity in importance in the world of physics, and is a fundamental equation of wave phenomenon. Everything and everyone in the universe has multitude of forms of waves, so it's important.

Back to his cat.

Quantum Physics may sound complicated but its essence is really quite simple. The word quantum is the singular of 'quanta'. Sound like the word quantity? Well it is. Take the humble river for example. As we experience this water, it is an amorphous blob of wet 'stuff' which can exist in infinte variations of quantity. However, you can seperate water into smaller and smaller units until you arrive at the smallest possible unit- the molecule- of water. This was long thought to not be the case with light, until a guy named Max Planck (lots of Germans, I know) came along and proved the contrary. Light, in fact energy in general, exists in smallest discrete units known as quanta. Quantum Physics describes these and other quantized phenomena.

But what about the cat?

Okay, well maybe I'm stalling because I don't entirely buy the quantum cat thing, or maybe I'm worried that the reason I don't buy it is I don't entirely understand it, but either way, here goes.

Say a cat is trapped in an inscrutable box with a vial of poison. The vial is set to break should the box detect a particular radiation. So the question is

Is the cat alive or dead?

According to Schrodinger NEITHER.

Until we open the box and discover what state it is in, we can't know what state it's in because it is 'stateless' until we open the box and discover what state it is in.
Is you mind blow yet? Yah, mine wasn't either.

Really, it was intended in it's bizaareness to expose the ubsurdity of some other interpretations of quantum phenomena, but it's use is often in the affirmative as an axiom of quantum exploration.

The adaptation most interesting to you dear reader is the quantum computer, which has been theorized as the end of electronic security as we know it. Instead of an information based on 2 state switches which always hold either one position or the other, a quantum computer would be in no state until you called upon it for it's data, at which time it would take any number (i'm not sure how many are possible) of positions. Why would it be an end to internet security as we know it? Because most of the sophisticated encryption algorithms in existence rely on the deceptively simple action of factoring very large numbers, albeit with a key. Hacking this  currently requires a mostly brute force method and takes a very long time to crack. The speed with which a quantum computer could do this would be minutes or even seconds, instead of days, weeks, and months (which is too long when they are changed frequently).

Why do I bring this up?
Because of the adaptation which is most interesting to me:

You can reason the options of a decision backwards and forwards for as long as you like, but in the end, you just don't know until you try.

And since you, dear reader, pressed all the way to the end of this over-winded blog, I will bless you with an extra nugget of information:

I'm ready to start bringing some players off the bench.