Newly elected Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) may be both dead and alive, according to various pundits, nurses, seers, and medical men. As a fellow who enjoys physics, this reminds me of one of the greatest thought experiments of all time – the tale of Schrödinger’s cat.
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Nitro the cat is placed in a steel cat box along with a Geiger counter, a vial of poison that becomes an easy-to-breathe aerosol if its container is shattered, a ball-peen hammer, and a radioactive substance. When the radioactive substance finally decides to decay, the Geiger counter detects it and triggers the hammer to fall, smashing the vial and releasing the poison, which subsequently kills Nitro the cat. Radioactive decay is a random process, and there is no way to predict when it will happen. Physicists say the atom exists in a state known as a superposition—both decayed and not decayed at the same time, as does Nitro and perhaps once mighty Mr. Fetterman.
Until the box is opened, an observer doesn’t know whether the cat is alive or dead—because the cat’s fate is intrinsically tied to whether or not the atom has decayed and the cat would, as Schrödinger put it, be “living and dead … in equal parts.”
In other words, unless that box is opened, the cat’s state is completely unknown, and therefore, the cat is considered to be both alive and dead at the same time until it is observed by someone outside the enclosed system.
“If you put Nitro in the box, and if there’s no way of saying what the cat is doing, you have to treat it as if it’s doing all of the possible things—being living and dead—at the same time,” explains Eric Martell, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Millikin University. “If you try to make predictions and you assume you know the status of the cat, you’re [probably] going to be wrong. If, on the other hand, you assume it’s in a combination of all of the possible states that it can be, you’ll be correct.”
Upon looking at the cat, an observer would immediately know if the cat was alive or dead, and the “superposition” of the cat—the idea that it was in both states—would collapse into either the knowledge that “the cat is alive” or “the cat is dead,” but never both.
So, physics brings us to the man who crushed Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican, for Pennsylvania’s open and proud US senator’s seat.
It has been suggested of late, on a growing number of news blogs far outside of the perpetual prevaricators posing on the mainstream press, that Senator John Fetterman, following two strokes, the latter being pretty serious, punctuated by that sad bit of his starring in the old “Lost at Sea” vaudeville show when he was sworn in with the terminally jocose Vice President Harris in attendance, is both alive and dead. In this state of superposition, it won’t matter about his voting. No, the Democrats have relied for years, in tight races all across our land, on those inviolate absentee ballots culled from the faithful Democrat dead who come to life for every election and then scurry back beneath the sod before dawn, and the votes are counted.
The Democrat stool, it has often been pointed out, is supported by three sturdy legs: one for the voting dead where the dead vote Democrat in over 85% of the cases examined, another for the ever more mollycoddled criminal class with tips of the hat to lily-livered DA’s who ran on Georgi Soros’ dime and were elected before being recalled, with the last leg representing that latest tranche of the three million illegal aliens who have caused such a ruckus for Governor Abbot (R-TX) and Mayor Adams (D-NYC) because Joe Biden has waived them home with the same storied success of a Yankees third base coach or the landing signal officer on a US aircraft carrier.
There is that famous meme featuring a Democrat filling out absentee ballots using names on tombstones in an ancient cemetery.
Despite the orders from numerous judges across America to rid the voting lists of the voting dead, they slither back onto these same lists and keep on voting as Democrats in the best Stephen King tradition. Sometimes a Republican corpse is hijacked by the Democrat side of a family and their post-mortem votes will appear in the latest voters’ rolls.
So, John Fetterman, if he’s lying in a coma being kept alive by machines, or if he’s playing liar’s poker with the nurses in intensive care, will cast his ballots Chuck Schumer’s way every time, alive or dead. And if Fetterman can remain both alive and dead through August 18th, then a special election for the Senate seat won’t be required to fill his then vacated seat and instead it would come time to let Governor Shapiro, who did away with required college degrees for 92% of the fabled Commonwealth’s positions and is said to have as many questionable miniatures on his kitchen shelf as Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), to appoint his replacement from Harrisburg’s array of highly educated and qualified hacks now that neither college or common sense is required in Ben Franklin’s and William Penn’s once dignified state.
Oh, yes, what about Nitro the cat? If you look closely at the photo you’ll note that Nitro’s sporting a George HW Bush button on his collar. Did that tough little cat, the closest I ever came to Schrödinger outside of physics classes in college, vote?
Having scanned the voting roll at my polling place near my last Massachusetts home in Brighton, when I voted for that female communist instead of Thomas “Tip” O’Neill shortly before moving to our less onerously taxed and far better-led Granite State, I found no cats or dogs registered. But I always wondered just how many loyal Democrats dead voted for the “Tipster” in that moment of his greatest need?
As for the dearly departed Nitro, it would break my heart if he was now voting Democrat.
