By the way, Jahled, is Zoot Schrödinger's Cat?

 

Come again, Scathe! Who's Schrödinger?

 

Jahled ducks for the volley of laughter about to be fired upon him, when the answer turns out to be common knowledge...

Schrödinger was this scientist who thought of a theorem involving a cat...

 

I'm still deeply out in the wilderness here, Scathe! What on earth are you on about? Stop being so esoterical....

Well, if my previous elaboration on quantum mechanics seemed farfetched to some of you, this one's going to send you to the moon!

 

Schrödinger was another scientist who busied himself with the mysteries of quantum mechanics. In 1935 he published an essay describing the conceptual problems in quantum mechanics. A brief paragraph in this essay described the cat paradox.

 

Roughly, the cat paradox comprises the following:

 

We take a sealed box with a cat in it. Inside the box, the cat is accompanied by a sealed canister of hydrocyanic acid. Attached to the box is a compartment with in it a Geiger counter attached electronically to the canister, and one nucleus of radioactive material. As we probably all know, rdioactive nuclei tend to decay. Now the experiment is set up like this: if the nucleus decays, this is picked up by the Geiger counter and it sends a signal for the canister to be opened, thus releasing the gas and killing the cat; if the nucleus doesn't decay, the Geiger counter doesn't send the signal and the cat lives.

 

You still with me? Good! Now we all know that if we were to open the box, we would find either a dead or a live cat, indicating whether the nucleus had decayed or not, right? The point is, however, that on a quantum level, the nucleus exists in a superposition of both states, so that, in a way, it's both decayed and non-decayed. This would the ultimately mean that the cat in the box exists in the same superposition of dead and alive at the same time.

 

I sort of figured that this was exactly the same kind of spooky thing regarding Zoot: he's been defeated (and probably even killed) in these forums over and over again, but he keeps coming back. So maybe he exists in a superposition of two states: defeated and undefeated at the same time...