As the hospital appeared in the distance, something inside you seemed to stiffen, almost imperceptibly. “Of course it’s possible,” you said, looking out the passenger-side window, “that quantum computing will change all this.”

“Change what?”

“This conversation.”

You said it was possible quantum computers would “crack” your research “wide open.”

“You mean like actual thinking and feeling computers?”

“Well… at the very least allowing them to replicate the human mind’s capacity for indeterminacy.”

The key difference, as you explained it to me, was that unlike current digital computers which required data to be encoded into binary digits, each of which was always in one of two definitive states (one or zero, on or off, yes or no, stop or go), quantum computing made use of superposition to process data. The ability for things to exist between states or in more than one state simultaneously.

“A queering of the binary,” I said with a smile, turning into the hospital parking lot.

“Um. Right. I’m not sure that’s how Einstein would have characterized superposition but… sure.”

In 1935, Albert Einstein wrote an article about the strange nature of quantum superpositions. He posited that an atom or photon could, in a single instant, exist in multiple states on account of being tied, on a quantum level, to multiple possible outcomes. The prevailing theory suggested that this atom or photon remained in a state of superposition until it was observed, at which point the superposition would instantly collapse into one of the possible definite states. By extension, superposition, when applied to groups of atoms and to the objects that they comprised, meant that objects or even people could be in states of quantum indeterminacy. In a letter to Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, Einstein wrote that an unstable keg of gunpowder will eventually contain a quantum superposition of both exploded and unexploded states. Schrödinger had some serious doubts about this. Namely, he wasn’t sold on the idea that physical systems didn’t have definitive properties until they were observed.

So that year he devised a thought experiment, which became known as “Schrödinger’s cat,” in order to illustrate the problem of quantum superposition as it is applied to everyday objects and living things. He came up with a scenario in which a superposition was created within a large-scale system by being tied to a superposition on a quantum level. The scenario centred around a cat that may have been simultaneously alive and dead given its entanglement with a subatomic event that may or may not have occurred.

You once described this experiment to me when I was eleven (seriously) after I asked what “quantum” meant. (I then proceeded to show off the next day in my grade six science class by bringing it up during a completely unrelated lesson on the water cycle.) Perhaps to make your explanation more graspable for me, you asked me to picture Chloe as Schrödinger’s cat.