13.7: Cosmos And Culture 11:38 am Wed January 23, 2013  Can You
Be In Two Places At Once? Let's Find Out!  Not <a href="http://w
ww.lassp.cornell.edu/ardlouis/dissipative/Schrcat.html">Schrödin
ger's (unfortunate) cat</a>. Credit iStockphoto.com  It is
rather rough to see that we are still in the stage of our
swaddling clothes, and it is not surprising that the fellows
struggle against admitting it (even to themselves).  This is how
Einstein closed his letter of December 22, 1950, to physicist
Erwin Schrödinger — one of the architects of quantum mechanics.
The "fellows" were Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac and the majority of
other physicists who embraced the so-called Copenhagen
Interpretation of quantum mechanics which, among other things,
restricted how much we could know of reality: there is an
insurmountable barrier, summarized in Heisenberg's Uncertainty
Principle, that states that we can't know both the position and
the velocity of a quantum object (an electron, a proton, an
atom) with arbitrary precision. This