Immutable Antinomy · Track 4 · middle

Ode to Schrodinger's Cat

The cat in the sealed box who is simultaneously alive and dead until observed. An ode to quantum superposition — the weirdness that survives every interpretation of quantum mechanics. Schrodinger invented this thought experiment to show how absurd the Copenhagen interpretation was, and proved it exactly right.

Lyrics

The steel is cold.
No windows.
Just the dark and the waiting.

Little ghost, you are curled inside.
Erwin sealed the chamber shut himself.
He drew the diagram in his paper, November 1935.
A flask of hydrocyanic acid, a single glass tear.
A hammer poised on a hair trigger.
And one atom of something that might decay.
Or might not.
The smallest coin flip for the biggest possible question.

And until my eye collapses the state, you are purring.
And until I lift the lid, your heart is stopped.
The wave function holds you in its perfect, terrible breath.
Both the warmth of life and the cold of the grave.
You are everything at once.
And you are nothing yet.

He wrote it all down for Naturwissenschaften.
A thought experiment, a joke to prove a point.
He told Einstein, "This is where your Copenhagen interpretation leads."
"A cat can't be a smear of probability, a quantum blur."
"The world we touch must be definite, solid, true."
But the math held firm.
And the universe just branched.

And until my eye collapses the state, you are purring.
And until I lift the lid, your heart is stopped.
The wave function holds you in its perfect, terrible breath.
Both the warmth of life and the cold of the grave.
You are everything at once.
And you are nothing yet.

Aren't we all in the box until someone looks?
Every unread test result.
Every door we haven't opened.
Every "I love you" that hasn't been said.
We are a world of pure potential, held in place.
Waiting for the observation.
The measurement that kills one future to birth another.

My hand is on the cold steel latch.
My shadow falls across the box.
I'm sorry. Forgive me.
I have to know which you are.