Afterlives of a Misunderstanding: Dialogue I — On Schrödinger’s Cat

Characters:

Professor Quillibrace

Mr Blottisham

Miss Elowen Stray

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Blottisham:

At last! The cat! Locked in a box, dead and alive. Pure theatre!

Quillibrace:

It’s theatre only if you bring a sense of dramatic urgency.

Elowen Stray:

But the idea is absurdly captivating. How can it be both?

Blottisham:

Exactly! A single feline simultaneously mocking life and death!

Quillibrace:

Only in our metaphors.

Blottisham:

Ah, so you admit there is something spooky.

Quillibrace:

The only spook is in our insistence on personifying possibility.

Elowen Stray:

So the cat isn’t really dead and alive?

Quillibrace:

No. The cat is neither. The theory merely constrains outcomes—it does not stage melodrama.

Blottisham:

But the equation suggests superposition!

Quillibrace:

Yes, of allowable outcomes. Not of feline theatrics.

Blottisham:

So we invented the cat for fun?

Quillibrace:

We invented the cat for comfort—so we could argue with the theory without feeling entirely foolish.

Elowen Stray:

It’s a kind of consolation.

Blottisham:

A very melodramatic consolation. I like it.

Quillibrace:

As do philosophers, less as a cat and more as a warning.

Blottisham:

Then the trouble with Schrödinger’s cat…

Quillibrace:

…is that we treated imagination as ontology.

Elowen Stray:

And blamed physics for our insistence on narrative.

Blottisham:

Poor cat.

Quillibrace:

Quite. And yet perfectly unbothered by our dramatics.

(Silence, as Blottisham contemplates a feline moral lesson.)