My previous posts resulted a few comments that questioned the mental well-being of the arctic explorer who had, in the opinion of the commentators, a strange form of “paranoia”.
These are presumably the same people who feel deep sympathy for the man who has only one coin of each type and wonders, for some reason that defies rational explaination, how many ways he can make change. They are also baffled by the woman who boards a train in Chicago, heading east, and wants to know where the westbound train leaving Buffalo an hour later will pass by her window. They are infuriated by the cruel physician who thinks first about Bayes rule before giving medicine with a high probability of serious side effects that treats a rare disease to an ailing child. They’re appalled at someone who would enjoy thinking about sealing a live cat and a flask of poison to be released at some random and unknowable time in a box.
Basically, they don’t like math in the form of word problems. Maybe they just don’t like math. Or maybe it’s the problems they don’t like.
Well, admittedly Schrödinger could have picked a less gruesome thought experiment–the cat is really immaterial. The real question isn’t whether the cat is alive or dead, it’s whether the flask is released (or, to be pedantic, whether or not the Cesium atom has decayed). I guess Schrödinger didn’t like cats.
It’s possible to restate the ‘arctic explorer in need of a match’ problem with equations, but it would be horrible to behold and most people wouldn’t even be able to read it. The prose version is nicer.
Trust me.
