THEORETICAL OBSERVATORY

Variation on Schrödinger’s Paradox (Text from 2018 concerning a work conceived in 2001©)

The Thought Experiment

The installation was conceived in 2001, after an analysis of Erwin Schrödinger’s thought experiment. First study, 2002. Prototype, 2008 and 2025. A plywood cube, 250 cm high, 200 cm wide, 130 cm deep, a red velvet curtain, a ladder, chairs. The curtain remains closed. A faint light filters from behind it. The source is not visible. No sound. That light says, something in there is alive. What it is, cannot be known. And it cannot be known by choice, not by chance. In 1935 Schrödinger posed a radical question, does reality exist independently of observation? Quantum mechanics said no. A particle, as long as it is not observed, can be in several places at once. This is the coexistence of states, not a mystery to be solved, but all possibilities real in the same instant.

The Scientific Debate

To make its logic seem absurd, Schrödinger devised an extreme case, a cat locked in a box with a Geiger counter, a small hammer, a vial of arsenic, and a radioactive atom. If the atom decays, the Geiger counter detects it, the hammer breaks the vial, and the arsenic kills the cat. But the atom, as long as it is not measured, is both decayed and intact. Therefore the counter has both triggered and remained silent, the hammer is both raised and fallen, the cat is both alive and dead, all at once, until the box is opened. Here lies the common misunderstanding. Schrödinger did not accept that reality depends on observation. His was a critique, quantum theory denies a definite state before measurement, offering only probabilities. A cat cannot be both alive and dead simply because it is unobserved. Schrödinger, the cat has a real state independently of observation. Bohr, Heisenberg, Born, before measurement there is no determined reality. Only the act of observing generates it.

The Supreme Potential

The work rejects both positions. Schrödinger, coexistence is an error to be corrected, a theoretical illusion to be overcome in order to return to a determined reality. Bohr, Heisenberg, Born, a provisional stage destined inevitably for measurement collapse. The installation reverses the terms. Superposition ceases to be a problem or a transition, it becomes the supreme principle of creation. Not a defect to be repaired, not a passive antechamber. It is the maximum expansion of the possible, where every variant, every possible destiny, coexists without mutual exclusion. In artistic creation the “not yet” is not a lack, but absolute plenitude. It is the state that contains all the futures that material realization will inevitably exclude. Before choice, the work is everything. After, it is only one thing. Drawing the curtain back does not reveal. It destroys. Physical collapse compresses the multiple into a single outcome. In art it reduces infinite potential to a determinate object. The work deliberately stops here, electing the superposed state as the eternal condition of the possible. For in physics observation is a neutral act. In human experience it is not. Whoever approaches a system charged with tension recognizes it. One knows that to intervene does not merely clarify what appears, but irreparably cancels everything that, once appearing, would vanish forever. One may contemplate that tension and decide not to break it. Not out of powerlessness, but to protect the infinity still kept alive by distance. In quantum theory, seeing is equivalent to defining. In life, one can look without deciding. The curtain remains closed because lifting it is irreversible. The potential preserves the totality. The accomplished work shows only a part of it. The “not yet” is the only state that knows no end, as long as it remains closed, nothing is extinguished. Lifting the curtain does not generate knowledge. It generates the end of possibility.

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