Favourite Quote: Science, Schrödinger and his cat

Image: found on www.npr.org

Time for another quote I came across while reading this wonderfully twisted novel Engleby by Sebastian Faulks. There are many delicious sentences in this book, but as this is a blog and I might sometimes lack time or inspiration, I'm going to make you wait for the others.

Without much more ado and all that, the quote:

“That’s part of the trouble with science. It doesn’t always help. I don’t find it useful to know that particles may appear in different places without having travelled the distance in between. I don’t find it enlightening that the only truthful way of thinking of Herr Schrödinger’s cat is as being simultaneously alive and dead. In fact, I don’t believe it is the only truthful way of thinking of it. It may be the only logical way of thinking of it, but that’s a different matter, isn’t it? The real problem, though, is that I don’t recall asking after the welfare of his cat in the first place.”

Sebastian Faulks - Engleby

It kind of reminds me of why I hate it when people just throw around Statistics to prove their point, as if a mere statistic (a percentage, a number, one result in one study) proves anything without proper context. And besides, who asked for numbers anyway?