You may remember my post on Schrödinger’s pizza. Of course, you may not, so go ahead and re-read it. I can wait. La la la la. Welcome back! All set? Fully grounded in pizza and coffee and their relationship to quantum physics? Great!
I was thinking today. Yes, as difficult as that may be to believe, I WAS thinking today. I was thinking that Ed McMahon’s commercials for Publishers Clearing House with his signature catchphrase: “You may already be a winner!” are another example of the “dead and not dead” behavior of Schrödinger’s cat.
You may be a winner, yet you may not be a winner, but both are true until you open the envelope with the sweepstake’s entry in it. This is a different behavior than if you buy a lottery ticket and the drawing has not happened yet, because you are neither a winner nor a loser at that point. But it seems to be very, very similar to the cat in Schrödinger’s thought experiment before you open the box.
(Some may argue that you are a loser for believing that you will be a winner in the lottery, but someone wins every now and again, so almost everyone is a loser, but, don’t worry, you are not a loser. Really, you are not.)
Go ahead and add Ed McMahon and Publishers Clearing House to pizza companies as physicist-employing marketers. Oh, and you may already be a winner.
I didn’t win.