If Roland Baines had read economists instead of quantum physicists, he might have discarded the Schrödinger Cat analogy in favour of a more pragmatic idea: opportunity cost, the notion that we can’t evaluate the true cost of a choice taken unless we incorporate into our evaluation the gains foregone in all the choices not taken. Whether we will it or not, the process of aging forces us to bring youth’s state of potentiality to an end and reveals to us what lies in our box. Both possibilities remain open until you take choices (or suffer accidents) that begin to foreclose one possibility or the other, or, in the case of Roland Baines, both.
By analogy, youth persists in a state of potentiality you can be a scientist or a firefighter, or, in the case of Roland Baines, a concert pianist or a tennis pro. The problem only resolves itself into an either/or proposition when we bring the state of potentiality to an end by looking inside the box. Is the cat in the box dead? Or is it not dead? As long as it remains in a state of potentiality, so Schrödinger tells us, then we can safely presume that it is both dead and not dead.
While not of a particularly scientific cast of mind, Baines has over the years read the occasional book by popularizers of quantum physics and cosmology and finds in the paradox of Schrödinger’s Cat a useful way of thinking about how his life has played out. In this, Ian McEwan’s umpteenth novel, we trace the life of Roland Baines, exact contemporary of Ian McEwan himself.
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