Real Rudy, hypothetical Trump, and Schrodinger's Cat
Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2019 2:52 am
Rudy Giuliani is actually a brilliant physicist. How else could you possibly interpret his words in the last 48 hours?
Giuliani on Sunday told the New York Times that the discussions about Trump Tower went on right up until the election. Today he clarified his statement: “My recent statements about discussions during the 2016 campaign between Michael Cohen and then-candidate Donald Trump about a potential Trump Moscow ‘project’ were hypothetical and not based on conversations I had with the president.”
So, like Schrodinger's Cat, any statement about the truth of what happened exits in the state of Quantum Superposition: Simultaneously being either true or false. Freddy Riedenschneider, the lawyer in the Cohen Brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There, used the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to argue that looking at a set of facts changed the reality they were in. How would you know what the facts looked like if you weren't observing them?
But more and more I think you will hear Mr. Giuliani claim that statements made by the President and Himself are simultaneously both real and hypothetical, both true and untrue.
Giuliani on Sunday told the New York Times that the discussions about Trump Tower went on right up until the election. Today he clarified his statement: “My recent statements about discussions during the 2016 campaign between Michael Cohen and then-candidate Donald Trump about a potential Trump Moscow ‘project’ were hypothetical and not based on conversations I had with the president.”
So, like Schrodinger's Cat, any statement about the truth of what happened exits in the state of Quantum Superposition: Simultaneously being either true or false. Freddy Riedenschneider, the lawyer in the Cohen Brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There, used the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to argue that looking at a set of facts changed the reality they were in. How would you know what the facts looked like if you weren't observing them?
But more and more I think you will hear Mr. Giuliani claim that statements made by the President and Himself are simultaneously both real and hypothetical, both true and untrue.