Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that infects rats via cat poo and comes back to infect cats when they eat infected rats. Humans can get infected when they pick up oozytes from the environment, in the past that’s been thought to mainly occur via raw or undercooked meat, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t happen with your infected cat pooping in your veggie garden, or you cleaning out the cat litter. Continue reading
Nitpick, I must ! Poor Erwin Schroedinger. I doubt that he ever foresaw that the name of the thought experiment he devised in 1935 would be used in the 21st century to describe any situation where something might be one thing or its opposite. That is just not what the Schroedinger’s Cat scenario is about ! Like, not at all !
Take for example Schroedinger’s Rapist, or Schroedinger’s Threat.
You can’t tell whether someone may be a rapist, or whether a threat made against you is for real or not. And this is a big problem, and a source of a lot of anxiety and caution, of course, and I get both those scenarios and the difficult situations resulting from it, especially for women. But. These scenarios are not at all like the Schroedinger’s Cat thought experiment ! Leave poor Erwin alone already !
In Schroedinger’s scenario, a cat in a box is neither dead nor not dead, stuck in some kind of quantum limbo until the observer actually has a look. It’s meant to illustrate the weirdness of some of the consequences of quantum mechanics. But it’s about whether a cat is dead or not dead, not about whether it’s a cat or a dog. It’s a cat alright. The fact that it is a cat that is in the box is not under disputation. Whereas all these people who come up with “Schroedinger’s X”, where X just means that X or not X may be the case, are using the analogy wrongly !
Ah whatever, I’ll let those fine philosophers Sheldon and Penny explain it to you.
Posted in Humour, Philosophy, Videos, Weirdness
Tagged Big Bang Theory, cat, dead, Greta Christina, Penny, quantum, rapist, scenario, Schroedinger, Sheldon, threat
