Are You Guilty of Collapsing a Wave Function?
Picture this: an ornate box at a birthday party. The whole room leans in. Inside the box simultaneously lives the best pizza on Earth and someone’s three-week-old science-project sandwich. Both are true until the lid comes off. That’s Schrödinger’s thought experiment in a takeaway bite: quantum systems can exist in several states at once — until an observation forces one reality to appear.
Erwin Schrödinger used a cat to dramatize the absurdity of applying quantum ideas to everyday things. Put a cat in a sealed box with a mechanism tied to a radioactive atom, and the cat’s fate — alive and dead — looks ridiculous. The thought experiment wasn’t meant to argue that actual cats are mystical Schrödinger-beasts; it was meant to point at a conceptual problem: how does the fuzzy “maybe” of quantum mechanics turn into the crisp “this is what happened” of our daily life?
Physics answers this with decoherence and measurement theory, but the metaphor survives because it’s a great truth-teller: observation matters. Not only seeing, but hearing, inferring, and imagining are ways we interact with possibilities. Hear a door slam and you’ve measured the presence of someone without staring. Rehearse a fight in your head and you’ve favorited one possible future until it feels like the dominant one.
Which brings us to a useful if slightly alarming idea: attention is an editor. Every glance, every rehearsal, every rumor you take seriously narrows the cloud of possibilities into a particular outcome. Your attention is tiny, but it’s relentless — collapsing endless micro-possibilities into the messy, lived world.
This has practical teeth. Catastrophic thinking amplifies unlikely outcomes into a reality you can inhabit. Conversely, deliberate attention reshapes the terrain — focusing on repair, curiosity, or gratitude changes what you notice and how systems around you respond. It doesn’t make you a magician. It makes you an agent in a feedback loop: attention alters behavior, behavior alters outcomes, outcomes stabilize into the patterns you live inside.
So are you guilty of collapsing wave functions? Absolutely. We all are. The better question is what you collapse. Choose poorly and you invent small tragedies. Choose better and you build a quieter, sharper life.
