Tag Archives: dogs

Shrodinger’s Dog

Erwin Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment illustrating quantum superposition is a terrible thing to do a cat.

First mentioned in a 1935 letter to Albert Einstein, the physicist wanted to illustrated the absurdity of a situation in which a cat is put in a box with a device that can kill it at randomly, or not at all. The cat may or may not be alive or dead, and anyone outside the box can’t know the cat’s fate until the box is opened.

Applied to quantum superposition, in which the nature of a particle or a wave cannot be determined until it is measured or observed, Schrodinger’s Cat asks how long can a thing exist in an either/or state?

As far as I know, no one has ever tried this with a real cat. Numerous physicists have used Schrodinger’s ideas to posit stranger things about quantum phenomena, including Hugh Everett’s “many worlds” interpretation, in which, upon opening the box, one cat, perhaps the dead one, is observed, while the living cat exists in another universe.

In 1960s, a few years after Everett came up with his formulation, the notion of “parallel worlds” became a fad in literary science fiction, which gradually spread to other kinds of entertainment. We now have an “alternative reality” genre of storytelling that asks what would happen if this thing didn’t happen, or that one did. The recent Academy-award winning film “Everything Everywhere All at Once” builds on this, by suggesting that if one thing happens in our universe, there are an infinite number of universes in which something different happens, no matter how ludicrous or unlikely, and that understanding can add help us cope with our apparent shortcomings.  Walt Disney’s Marvel Comics Universe has used this idea to revive popular characters have been written out or killed, and tell the outsider-learns-humility superhero story over and over again.

This said, it still, in our universe at least, a terrible thing to do to a cat. Why dod Schrodinger put in a box, rather than some other animal? Perhaps a universe exists in which people discuss Schrodinger’s Hamster. To quote the great Chico Marx in the movie “The Cocoanuts”: “Viaduct? Why not a chicken?”

Indeed! Why be so mean to animals? Why not inanimate objects? How about Schrodinger’s Mat, a variation on the theme of Paul Simon’s song, One Man’s Ceiling is Another Man’s Floor?

Or Schrodinger’s Bat: in another universe, bases were also loaded at the top of the ninth inning. The hometown hero stepped up to the Homeplate, swung the bat and did NOT strike out!

Or Schrodinger’s Spat, in which two nice, well-meaning people go into a bar, or find themselves at a family gathering, or in an office where they get into an dispute over something so infinitesimally unimportant, but the argument goes on and on and on and on….

And what can we do about Schrodinger’s Fat?  No matter how much we exercise, what fancy new drugs we take or what we do or don’t eat—those extra pounds are coming from another universe in which scheming slim fit savants have figured out a way to outsource excess flab into our world.

This brings to mind a recent evening that required us to put the dogs in a kennel. We went to sleep in an unusually quiet house. For a single night we were without terriers to bark, growl and yip at delivery trucks and people walking dogs that had the audacity to sniff, snort and raise a leg in front of our house.

I’ll admit, it was easier to go to close my eyes and dream, until I awoke in the darkest part of the night and thought of what Schrodinger described as quantum entanglement: particles that interact with each other will continue to interact with each other no matter how far apart they may be.

Did I hear a dog breathing near my ear? Was that a lick I felt on my face?

A message came into my mind. “We’re okay. We’re not with you. But we love you anyway.”

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The Rumsfeld Pen

One of the chores of living in the free world is picking up other people’s trash.  In our neighborhood, this includes dog droppings, stomped plastic water bottles, dented drink cans, crumpled fast food bags, baby wipes, and pieces of boxes and packing material that once held something that brought  someone joy.

No, we don’t live in a landfill. Our surroundings are well-landscaped, so anything that doesn’t belong is all too easy to see. When we walk our dogs, visit the mail box, roll out the trash cans or go out to pick up the morning newspapers, my wife and I take note of the weather, inspect whatever is green or blooming in the front and side gardens, and then scan our immediate surroundings, our eyes sweeping left to right, for yucky stuff scattered by those who feel free to do so.

We actually caught someone in the act a few days ago. “Pick up the poop!” my wife said to the culprit, who stopped in her tracks, dragged her dog back to the scene of the crime, removed the offending pile and then left an even larger pile in front of our house the following morning.

Of course, not everything we find is garbage. I cringed at the sleepless nights awaiting whoever strolled a baby and didn’t see the infant fling away a pacifier. Melting snow will reveal a lost glove, scarf, reading glasses.  caused by an infant’s pacifier hiding in the bushes. Those we put where they could be seen, at the edge of the sidewalk, atop a fire hydrant or hanging from a road sign with the hope that those who lost them will retrace their steps and find them.

We had a problem with the pen. It appeared to be an ordinary black plastic ball point until we looked closer and saw, in fading gold ink, the seal of the US Department of Defense. Next to that, in the same fading gold, was a loopy signature. I squinted and couldn’t figure it out.

My wife could. “Donald Rumsfeld,” she said.

I glanced around at the staid, respectable beige-and-brick facades of our suburban enclave. Some who lived among us were retired military, intelligence, state department and aerospace. Might this belong to a neighbor who had worked for Rumsfeld when he was Secretary of Defense for Presidents Gerald Ford and George W. Bush. Did they remember him as the architect of the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars, the promoter of “shock and awe” and “known unknowns”? Did their retirement package include a souvenir pen and, maybe, a challenge coin?

Or did they find themselves in the Pentagon’s Fort America gift shop one day and figure that a pen emblazoned with Rumsfeld’s signature was the perfect gift for…

Again, we looked around. What home hid the owner of this pen? What might have happened to make them lose it?

We made a guess. We put the pen in front of a door and continued our dog walk.

On the next morning I glanced at that door. The pen was gone.

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The Dogs Are Confused

The sports games shut down at night. The schools closed the following morning at 5:30 a.m.

We have a plague upon our houses.

With so much around us banned or discouraged, more people are at home more of the time. Litter from kids snacks clutters the landscape. Most of the neighborhood’s cars stay sleeping in their driveways. We don’t hear so many jet planes roaring overhead.

And the dogs are confused.

They know when they’re supposed to be walked. They know who has been near their turf, when that dog and walker came through and whatever they may have left as a calling card.

But now, people who used to walk their dogs before the sun came up, are sleeping late and taking different paths. From the way my dog behaves, the common calling-card locales have new aromas, some of them not so friendly.

I don’t know why some dogs adore each other, and others drop into a fighting crouch, growl, bark and pull on the leash. It probably has something to do with scent, size and atty-tood–the big German shepherds swaggering about, tossing off looks at the smaller dogs that say, “Watch it, kiddo. You could be my lunch.”

And yet, the smaller dogs, especially the Yorkies and Chihauhaus, have this manic urge to challenge anything on four legs, no matter how large or Teutonic: “How dare you even exist in my line of smell?! Why, if I wasn’t connected to this person,  tied to this person, in LOVE with this person who really has no idea what they would do without me, I’d have my teeth in your neck!”

I used to make a joke that it was all because of the last election. Or the election before that.

But elections have come and gone and people who genuinely couldn’t care less, now feel that they have a right to be as cruel as possible to other people, especially on the Internet. Until this coronavirus came upon us, people were sitting in chairs, in comfortable rooms, with too much food in their kitchens and too much time on their hands, writing all kinds of nasty, hateful, ugly and profoundly unAmerican stuff on-line because…

Why? I really don’t know.  Is it because other people–those in power, those with money and nice clothing, those who say things that make us mad–are better at being awful, than we are?

Or are we, on some level, dogs that imagine themselves part of a territorial pack, and it really doesn’t matter what our reasons are–we have to growl and get mad and challenge dogs in other packs because, on some other level, we think that all this growling and barking will impress the alpha dog, or, maybe, it just feels good to growl and bark when you’re tied to a human being who just doesn’t get it?

I don’t mean to belittle anyone with genuine grievances. Over my lifetime, I’ve seen things become better for some people and worse for others and, like a dog tethered to a human being, there are parts of what my dog and I might call reality that I just don’t understand.

For every person who has claimed that success equals hard work and a positive attitude, I’ve seen others who have worked–and hoped–just as hard, only to see their fortunes sink.

For every dog fed steak and walked five times a day, how many others get the dried junk from a sack and are lucky if they have a few minutes a day in the back yard?

What about the dogs that are abused and abandoned? What could they possibly do that would justify that?

Any single life lost to illness is horrific and catastrophic for those who cared for and loved that peson. Right now, the numbers of people who have died from this virus are small. No one knows how much those numbers will grow.

We can be certain that the numbers will grow.

It doesn’t matter who you are, what clothes you wear, what college you attended, how much money you make, who you pray to, what awful green smoothie you’ve had for breakfast, how many times you resist the urge to rub your eyes that are itching because it’s allergy season–

You can get it. And some of those who get it, die from it.

Right now, my dog is confused at all the other dogs being walked at different times by people she’s never sniffed before. Friend or foe, she wants to know.

And I’m confused by the people who insist on blaming others, finding fault, littering the Internet with their righteous rage, and otherwise getting mad because what was routine a few weeks ago, is now a matter of life and death.

I can think of only one thing beyond all the hand washing, elbow coughs and crowd avoidance that can lead you out from confusion:

You can love the fact that you’re alive, that you’re not alone, that you can help others in ways big and small. You can appreciate every moment you have in the sun.

And understand that, no matter how you voted in the last election, we really are in this together.

 

 

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