Rusty Cherkas
Co-Creator/Schrodinger’s Mice
Brian Badgette
Allow me to establish my credentials, since Arthur is too modest to establish them for me. I have been a member of the Arthur Trope Fan Club since before it was fashionable — which is to say, since before it existed in any formal sense — and I have served, humbly but (let the record show) unanimously, as President of the Newbury, Australia chapter for eleven consecutive terms. Our membership is select. Our newsletter is thorough.
It was on that newsletter’s official letterhead that I first wrote to Artie, years ago, with a modest suggestion: that somebody ought to look into what really happened in Oxford in 1935. To my delight and — I don’t mind telling you — my astonishment, he wrote back. Personally. In pen. The comic that resulted was syndicated by the good people at Picklefish Comics, whose subsequent demise I maintain was entirely unrelated, and the rest is the book you are now holding.
Now. To the matter at hand.
Erwin Schrödinger was a serious man, not given to frivolities — such as, to pick an example entirely at random, proposing that cats be sealed in boxes. Entropy and Causality demand that every event be preceded by a cause. So I ask you, one rational adult to another: what could cause a serious physicist to publicly suggest boxing a cat, other than the patient lobbying of a small, furry, causative agent with an urgent interest in the containment — or the exile, or, let us be honest, the elimination — of a resident predator?
The mice, reader. It was the mice.
Consider the elegance of it. Schrödinger spends weeks flummoxed, obsessed with demonstrating the ridiculousness of unpredictable events in the quantum realm, and hopelessly stuck — you could not, in 1935, purchase a quantum scale from any reputable instrument shop. Then, one late night, the great man falls asleep at his bench. And in the morning: a fully sketched apparatus. A cat. A box. A vial. One unpredictable nuclear decay event, aimed with suspicious precision at the one creature in the laboratory that the mice had the most to gain by removing. Ask the detective’s question — who benefits when the cat is in the box? — and Causality points in one direction only, and that direction is approximately four inches off the floor.
I am aware this sounds improbable. But mice have always done the quiet work of Western culture and then been forgotten for it. Of Mice and Men. Mickey. Supermouse and Stuart Little; Topo Gigio; The Mouse That Roared; Aesop’s mouse, gnawing the lion free of the hunter’s net. Try, if you can, to imagine America without Disneyland. Mice carry half of Psychology and most of Biology on their backs!! Why should Quantum Physics be the one field they are denied?
What follows concerns rather more recent events, in a different laboratory, involving a scientist I am proud to call my pen pal. You will notice the pattern holds. Arthur maintains, for professional and I suspect legal reasons, that everything in these pages is fiction. Arthur is a wonderful cartoonist and a terrible liar. Read on — keep one eye on the cheese and the other on the floorboards — and ask only the question I first posed on chapter letterhead all those years ago: who benefits when the cat is in the box?
— Rusty Cherkas
President, Arthur Trope Fan Club — Newbury (Australia) Chapter
Newsletter available upon request
P.S. Tom and Jerry. Three Blind Mice. I could go on. I have, in the newsletter.
