The concept of Schrödinger’s Cat can shed some light on the contradictory impulses of Brexit, writes Helen Drake (Loughborough University London) – or can it?
Shamefully, I remember next to nothing of the physics I learned at school, but I do know a bit about ‘Brexit’. And I’m a fan of the US hit TV comedy show The Big Bang Theory. One of its famous episodes introduced viewers to the concept of Schrödinger’s Cat. Sheldon, the theoretical physicist, invoked this thought experiment to argue that only by ‘opening the box’ can we know which of two self-contradictory outcomes will prevail in a given situation.
In the case of Schrödinger, the cat and the box, and for reasons best left to physicists to explain, the cat was, theoretically, both dead and alive until the box was opened and the cat observed. Until Sheldon’s friends Penny and Leonard went on a romantic date, the prospect of their friendship becoming a romance was equally credible and implausible. Their relationship existed in both its platonic and romantic states as long as and until the moment of truth.
This analogy helps me think about Brexit – or I think it does. Brexit is the cat and the box is the Withdrawal Agreement agreed on Saturday by the EU and the UK. The Withdrawal Agreement is concluded and voilà! Brexit becomes knowable. Brexit will then mean Brexit.
From the multiple states of Brexit-being previously holding sway will emerge not just a Brexit but the Brexit. Remainers and Leavers, the EU27 and the UK, the French and the British, the English and the Irish and so on will have all observed the cat and acknowledged its state of being for themselves. We all get on with our lives.
If only it were that simple (as simple as quantum physics?). The problem with Brexit for cats is that the Withdrawal Agreement is just the beginning of Brexit. Brexit, in other words, will continue to exist in all its theoretical states. For ever.
There can be no Brexit box moment because Brexit was never a dead-or-alive, in-or-out, Remain-or-Leave binary choice. Open the box and we will observe many cats in many stages of life and death. For cats read choices, options, opportunities and threats. Some – but which? – will be struck stone dead at the moment of opening, consigned to history.
Some were killed off by the UK’s referendum vote alone, viz. the UK’s relinquishing of its six-month presidency of the Council of the European Union, due to have started on 1 July 2017. Others have yet to be brought to life.
The UK’s membership of the EU was never a simple matter of being ‘in.’ The UK was for 46 years a semi-detached, awkward partner with a special deal. Leaving the EU is unlikely to be a simple matter of being ‘out’.
Even the hardest Brexit scenarios involve trade-offs that will deliver a state of being not quite in and not quite out, other than in the narrowest of legal terms. Of course the UK will become a Marks and Spencer’s third country (not just any third country) by virtue of having once been an ex-member state. By dint, too, of its geographical proximity to the rest of the EU.
To take but one example: the chassé-croisé of people and ideas across the English Channel will not cease at the stroke of Brexit. That flow has survived all manner of turbulence between the UK and its French neighbours. Indeed, the greater the disruption, the fuller the flow (yesterday’s emigrés from the French Revolution; today’s ‘lifestyle migrants’ from middle England).
Schrödinger’s Cat, albeit in its popular cultural version and as filtered through my very rudimentary understanding, is one way for me to think about the paradox of a ‘Brexit’ that seemingly means any number of things to any number of people.
As with Penny and Leonard in The Big Bang Theory, a new state of being will emerge from the Article 50 negotiations that will alter the nature of the pre-existing relationship between the UK and the EU.
Unlike a fictional romance or a theoretical cat, the consequences of Brexit will be real. They will be experienced by countless stakeholders of the battles of Brexit, most of whom have not yet been in the mix, or anywhere near.
Perhaps the UK Prime Minister was correct to claim that ‘Brexit means Brexit.’ Far from a binary choice, it spells change and like Schrödinger’s cat, reminds us that the real world is not always what it seems.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Brexit blog, nor the LSE. It first appeared at The UK in a Changing Europe blog.
Helen Drake is Brexit research leader at The UK in a Changing Europe and Professor of French and European Studies at Loughborough University.
I am not sure the box is the withdrawal agreement. In the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics the box is what keeps the cat in the state of superposition of alive and dead at the same time. It is the act of opening and observing that eventually collapses the wave function. If Brexit is the cat, then nobody has opened the box yet. The withdrawal agreement is one way of opening the box, a second referendum another and crashing out yet a different one.
Helen Drake is entitled to use the cat thought-experiment as a metaphor when discussing Brexit in any way she likes. However, I have made different use of the same opportunity.
Schrödinger’s Brexit
https://johnallmanuk.wordpress.com/2019/04/14/schrodingers-brexit/
I’ve been finding it helpful to think of the EU membership package as a set of school photographs of your child. You really want some of them, but not necessarily the whole set. However, the various items are sold in fixed combinations and priced in such a way that, in the end, it becomes a better deal to purchase the full set.
The problem was, that the country as a whole has not come to that conclusion before the referendum. In fact, various advocates of Leave promised or promoted different combinations and prices than were on offer. And different voters attached different values to each of the pictures on offer.
The decision should never have been put to the people while the choices were still so undefined. This was an utter dereliction of duty on the part of our parliamentarians. It has gradually become clear that their own lack of understanding of the issues involved and the goods on offer has played a significant part in their decision to embark on this disastrous course for the country.
I’m not saying either Leave or Remain is definitely better for the country in the long run. Nobody knows, and what’s more, nobody could know. Too many variables are at play. What I do know is that almost none of the country’s current problems will be solved by Brexit. In fact, Brexit will create a whole new set of them on top of those already in existence.
Ultimately it is all about values. What does the UK as a nation value most, including the very continued existence of the (UK) Union itself. Or the stability and peace in Europe, which is hardly ever mentioned in the national debate. None of these really fundamental questions were adequately answered before the referendum.
Whether the cat will ultimately turn out to be alive or dead when the box is finally opened is the answer to a question that didn’t need asking. In the meantime the country, and most of all its rulers, has been divided into “Alivers” and “Deaders” who squabble amongst each other while investment and talent flees elsewhere and the very real and pressing problems faced by the country go unaddressed.
Quantum Physics is a marvellous science. It ties physics, metaphysics, religion, politics, spirituality, international high finance, geopolitics, economics, psychology, philosophy and more all together. Social issues, morality, sexuality, education,… nothing is left out. Sofar, no superpositions of any note have collapsed. There is a long chain, like a fifty year backlog, of political and financial dominoes waiting to collapse in a wave such as Europe has not seen since WWII, but A.Pollington is blissfully unawares.
One might ask why Cameron did call the referendum in the event, and why he didn’t hedge by stating the government would regard the referendum as advisory pending the result. For a start, a close result for Leave might have given Cameron a reason to go back to negotiate with the EU heads and extract yet some concessions pending a call to honour the result, but for the fact that Cameron had already closed that avenue with the EU heads( of the federal state to be). Imo, Cameron had already concluded in cahoots with the EU heads that in the event of a vote to Leave, the UK electorate should be made an example of to discourage other EU member countries’ electorates clamouring for an exit referendum. Some day we might find out, if we live long enough, what the plan really was, at the time. However, following the entire saga, charade is the word, but getting towards the farcical now, the fibbing and lying, prevaricating, and so forth, on the part of not only duplicitous May, but pretty much all MPs in Cabinet and most other MPs who had a say in the matter, makes it patently obvious the entire show was contrived in cooperation with the EU apparatus.
Was it clever or utterly desperate? If they meant to educate the world about politics and especially EU federalisation project politics, it was very clever. However, if the EU heads meant to proceed with the EU federalisation project, it was utterly stupid. The last two years have been an eye opener for people who did not know what went on exactly in the inner political circles in the Western European political top echelons. Strictly speaking, that should be singular. This European political elite works as one. If that is a good thing or not depends on the kind of world you wish for people who come after you.
The public at large certainly needs educating. Ever so many commentators and commenters have been saying that the referendum was not clear. It is due to the efforts by most political operatives and the media to bamboozle people that there has been so much confusion while the matter was and is crystal clear. There was nothing undefined about it. For a nation-state to sever such ties as the UK bound to the EU is nothing new in principle. To become a sovereign state, in this case a sovereign state once again, has par for the course these last two or three centuries. In this case, the choice was stark and simple, but not simplistic. Cameron had made it clear, before and afterward. Parliament put its stamp on it. How can people be confused?
Now we come to the chain of superpositions waiting like dominoes to collapse in a super wave. The peoples of Western Europe, by dint of their sociopolitical and geo-financial development, are at a stage whereby they have to wake up and smell the coffee in order to make democracy work or be overtaken by inexorable world developments and be taken over by the very people who have been in charge all along and who morphed decades ago from a benign paternalistic ruling claque into a malignant predatory claque of elitist cliques.
So, it’s all very simple. The window of opportunity for the European peoples to regain self-determination is slowly but surely closing. The longer people wait, the higher the cost to regain sovereignty and the citizenship that goes with it. If people wait to be liberated by a succession of waves of lawless hordes they will not be saved. But, in my experience, the majority generally choose to learn the hard way. Interesting times, now.
@Jacob “One might ask why Cameron did call the referendum in the event”
To fulfil a manifesto commitment made to stop people voting UKIP.
“… and why he didn’t hedge by stating the government would regard the referendum as advisory pending the result.”
Because he wanted Remain to win the referendum and didn’t want Remain-and-reformers voting Leave in the hope of fresh negotiations and the UK staying in the EU on better terms, as Boris Johnson had suggested. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/22/david-cameron-ridicules-boris-johnsons-second-referendum-idea
But maybe conspiracy theories are more fun than simple explanations.
The Schrodinger’s Cat paradox is not a good analogy for Brexit because Brexit is an event, not a state. And there is no box as such…
A much better analogy in the question of whether the prorogation of Parliament was or wasn’t legal – the box being the Law itself….
Michael Gove was on the rack on Radio 4 this morning, with Justin Webb trying to pin him down with ‘the Government did something illegal and are you going to apologise?’
Gove wriggled and twisted, saying that the Government had advice that it ¬¬was legal, Webb then maintaining that it couldn’t have been because the Supreme Court said so.
The truth it seems to me is that like Schrodinger’s Cat, Johnson’s prorogation both was and wasn’t legal at the time, within the box of the Law. It was only the opening of the box by the Supreme Court that found it not to be legal.
What is at question with Schrodinger’s cat is a state – dead or alive, legal or not legal. Brexit is an event, not a state, so the analogy doesn’t really work.