On my slight acquaintance with quantum physics, the most appealing concept is Erwin Schrödinger’s thought experiment of the dead and alive cat. You might remember how it goes: the luckless feline is sealed in a box with poison and a radioactive atom, the observer cannot know if the cat survives or not until the box is opened, so while in the box it is both dead and alive simultaneously. Writing amid the turbulence of science and politics in the Thirties, Schrödinger demonstrated the impact external observation has on any experiment and its conclusions. But the idea popped into my head as a strangely adept metaphor for the battles at Westminster.
We live in the era of Schrödinger’s politics, in which the two main parties jostling for power are simultaneously winning and losing, depending on what we want to hear and who is making the judgment. And in the manner of his experiment, that leads to a lack of certainty about what is likely to result.
