Sometimes, in life you are stuck with a decision which involves making a big change in life where the outcome may be good or bad and you just can’t figure it out. The outcome, if good, is extremely desirable but how can one go ahead with the choice with there being just as good a probability of a negative outcome? This situation has been tackled and talked about in many different ways over centuries but I plan to share it today under new light.
I was watching an episode of the show “The Bing Bang Theory” today in which they portrayed the use of an amazing chain of thought so I thought I’d write about it here. The episode mentioned an experiment called the Schrodinger’s cat which originally was used to illustrate the incompleteness of the theory of quantum mechanics when going from subatomic to macroscopic systems (obviously, I didn’t understand this either!).
Anyway, what happens in that experiment is that a cat is placed in a box with a sealed flask of poison which would break and open at a random point of time. Now since no one knows when or if the poison is released, until the box is opened, the cat can be thought of as both alive and dead.
So basically, what it says is that if the outcome is probabilistically good or bad, its nature can deterministically be determined only after one finally…. “opens the box”.
You can apply this exact theory to the difficult change-involving decisions you face. So you may optimistically open the box so that if the cat is alive, you can rejoice. But if you are thinking about the possibility of finding out that the cat is dead and are scared of opening the box, you must know that if you don’t ever open the box to feed the cat, it’ll eventually be just two different kinds of deaths that the cat is expected to get!!!
