A Tale for the Time Being (66 page)

160
. Charles Bennett. Oliver looked up the quote later and found it’s from an article about quantum computing by Rivka
Galchen, which appeared in
The New Yorker
, May 2, 2011.

161
. For more on the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, see Appendix E.

162
. For more on Hugh Everett, see Appendix F.

163
. 1 fingersnap = 65 moments, and 6,400,099,980 moments = one day, so 6,400,099,980 ÷ 65 = 98,463,077 fingersnaps per
day.

164
. Erwin Schrödinger came up with the term
entanglement
in the course of devising his thought experiment. Einstein
later called entanglement “spooky action at a distance.”

165
. Schrödinger proposed his enigmatic cat as a challenge to this idea of observer-induced collapse. He maintained that
physicists hung on to the notion of collapse because without it, all possibilities, physical and otherwise, would begin to propagate, and before long, “we should find our surroundings
rapidly turning into a quagmire, or sort of featureless jelly or plasma, all contours becoming blurred, we ourselves probably becoming jellyfish.”