ACCORDING TO ALICE..."One fine day, when the CHESHIRE CAT and I were having a, oh so pleasant, conversation...a silly grin appeared on its face! And all the while we were continuing to converse, I REALLY can't remember what the subject was, but I DO REMEMBER asking Cheshire-Puss 'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go...', the CAT kept assuring me that EVERYONE here in Wonderland was...MAD! So, 'It didn't really matter...' And then, just as I was trying to get to the bottom of things...the poor CAT just DISAPPEARED!... or, I should say, slowly de-materialized. And I don't have the slightest idea where it has gone to!" DEAD?orALIVE?ACCORDING TO A CERTAIN SHRODINGER..."In quantum-physics, this questions refers to my thought experiment, which I posed in 1935, wherein a live CAT is placed in a chamber or box, which is wired to an appratus which will flood the container with a poisonous gas if it detects an ELECTRON. The question was simply: 'If we imagine a sample electron to be 'somewhere' in the box, and a partition is added, dividing the box in half, and the detector for the gas is suddenly opened from one end, does the elctron escape and kill the CAT?' MORE APPROPRIATELY, we can assume that 'prior to observation, there are two nebulous electron ghosts, each inhabiting one half of the chamber (after partition), waiting for an observation to turn one of them into a REAL ELECTRON, and simultaneously cause the other to vanish completely. Until the observer actually opens the chamber, we could say there is a superimposition of states: 'there and not-there'! Similarly, we can posit that the CAT is both 'living' and 'not living', until, that is we take a 'look' and see!..." And then there is the 'special case' of a certain CAPTAIN SHRODINGER, a poetic seafaring sort, who, having inherited a semi-transparent CAT (not a ghost!), which he named 'Mr. MacTavish', set sail some time ago TO THE EDGE OF SPACE AND TIME to get rid of the damn thing...because 'everyone knows', that you cannot get rid of a 'unreal' or transparent cat in a REAL UNIVERSE, without having to resort to some drastic measures and some damn good navigation, especially when you get near the EVENT HORIZON at the edge of the BLACK HOLE!" XAR . --all of which brings us back to the nagging question: "WHICH OF THESE INTERPRETATIONS
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