Sermon: "Schrodinger's Baptism", Romans 6:1-14 (May 21, 2023)

You’ve all heard of Schrodinger’s cat, right? I’m no physicist, but I’ll do my best to summarize (my apologies in advance to any physicists who may be pained by my rudimentary explanation). As I understand it, Schrodinger’s Cat is a thought experiment performed by physicist Erwin Schrodinger to demonstrate the paradox of quantum indeterminacy (non-physicists, stay with me). This principle says that the physical state of a quantum particle cannot be definitively known apart from observation of it – in other words, observation itself plays a role in determining the particle’s physical state. Schrodinger took this idea out of the realm of quantum particles and into the “real world”: he posited that if a person were to seal a hypothetical cat in a box with something that could eventually kill it, they wouldn’t be able to tell whether the cat was alive or dead until they open the box to look. Therefore, according to quantum indeterminacy, the cat would be both alive AND dead until the box was opened and the cat’s state was observed.