Prince Caspian and Schroedinger's Cat

Prince Caspian and Schroedinger's Cat

By Jonathan Aquino

Saturday Stories

June 8, 2019

I

One afternoon recently, I was on my way home as the street lights came on. It made me think of the nature of light. Light is made of photons which can sometimes be like a wave or a particle, so it can also be both a wave and a particle at the same time. This reminds me of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, first posed in 1925 by the Nobel Prize-winning Danish physicist Niels Bohr, that says a quantum particle exists in all possible states at once, and the state it will appear in would depend if there is an observer. So, if no one is looking, a thing is also something else simultaneously. 

II

And, naturally, it calls to mind Schrodinger's Cat. In 1935, the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist Edwin Schrodinger posed this idea as an argument against the Copenhagen Interpretation. Imagine a steel box, and inside the box there is a cat and a vial of radioactive poison that is set to be released at a random time. In other words, our hypothetical cat will die but we don't know when. And since the box is sealed, we can only assume that the cat is dead or alive, but it can't be both alive and dead at the same time.   

III

And so I thought: is it really possible for something to be one thing and be another thing simultaneously? For example, can a person be in one place, but also be somewhere else? More to the point, can a person be in London and in Narnia at the same time? In C.S. Lewis' "Prince Caspian," the second book in "The Chronicles of Narnia" series after "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe," Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy had stayed in Narnia and reigned as Kings and Queens. They were there for many, many years, but when they found themselves back in London, they realized they have never been gone at all. 

IV 

Time is a curious thing, probably since it is relative, because when they got back to Narnia after a couple of days, it turns out they have been gone for a thousand years. Appparenly a lot of things have happened. Narnia was now ruled by the cruel King Miraz who had stolen the throne from the rightful heir Prince Caspian who is his nephew, like what Claudius did to Hamlet, or what Seth did to Horus. Their castle, Cair Paravel, is now in ruins. There they meet the dwarf Trumpkin, a.k.a. Tyrion Lannister. In the movie version, they saved him from the Telmarine soldiers who were about to drown him. Susan aimed her arrow, and she said, "Drop him!" The idea was to save him, but the soldiers took it literally, and so they threw him into the river. 

Photo courtesy of Harper Collins