June 25 2002 Vampire Cat Accident Reported

Strange News by Bradley Zang

What do Albert Einstein, Erwin Schroedinger and Chess Master Roger Penrose have in common?

Well besides the obvious chess, math, physics.

Answer: They all at one time contemplated making a Vampire Cat .

In 1935 Erwin Schroedinger wrote Albert Einstein a letter proposing an experiment that could lead to the creation of a living dead cat.

You probably remember Albert Einstein as that mediocre Chess player who claimed his friend World Champion Emanuel Lasker talked too much about chess.

Anyway Schroedinger whose most memorable quote is, " I do enjoy a good game of Chess. ", wrote a letter that reads more like a cook book. It said, " A cat is placed in a steel chamber, along with the a device which must be secured against direct interference by the cat. This device is a Geiger counter with a very tiny bit of radioactive substance. Perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays.

Also, with equal probability, perhaps none decays. If that happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid in the box. If one has left this system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat mixed or smeared out in equal parts." (I know a lot of you think the JCN makes things up but the quantum mechanics equations governing this experiment doesn't just say the atom had a probability it would decay.

It also says it did decay and didn't decay. Two realities.)

Anyway some chess enthusiasts from Glouchester (United Kingdom) have an interesting story to tell.

Let Bill Makemson their spokesperson tell you his story in his own word. "Thank you for hearing my story. No other reputable Chess News Letter would.

In the first year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II (1952) a group physicist from my old alma mater, the University College Dublin (Ireland), formed a secret chess society.

If you weren't a physicist, you couldn't get in. They called themselves the Chess Cabal.

Their leader, a wealthy Irish protestant who never revealed his true identity, was called the Baron. He decided to open their first clubhouse on land he inherited in Gloustershire ( England). It was a great success and chess activities really blossomed in the first year. On the coldest day in the winter of 1953, he played in a tournament in Leinster (Ireland).

The Baron returned to his hotel room very late that night because he took in a traditional Kilkenny cat fight. Despite his lack of sleep, managed to barely eke out two wins the next morning. He went to bed the next night and found his cat George keeping him awake crying and hissing all night. He then lost his morning game.

This was a disaster to him for he was disqualified from representing Ireland in the 1954 Olympiad (Amsterdam).

Later at night he decided to conduct Schroedinger's recommended experiment on his beloved cat George. Within one year with just a few simple modification of the Schroedinger's original recommendation the Chess Cabal were ready to preceded.

In the Winter of 54, they placed the George in the box in the above mentioned self contained system on their Gloustershire club houses deck overlooking the pastoral Severn river. This was done on the deck because they didn't want any cyanide gas being released into their club house. Also the box opened automatically on a 1 hour timer so that no one would inadvertently breath in some of the gas.

The Chess Cabal just wanted to see if the cat would be dead or alive. At the very beginning of the experiment, a thunderous rainstorm started and the members went inside for a few minutes. Unfortunately, the rain caused the Servern river banks to overflow and the box as well as the deck was washed away."

The question of whether the cat in the Schroedinger experiment should be dead or alive has been addressed by many scientists.

I like the suggestion by Jacksonville's foremost physicist John Archibald Wheeler that, " the universe is a self-excited circuit - a system whose existence and whose history and perhaps even its laws are determined by measurements".

Some say the answer is the anthropic cosmological principle. It says by looking in the box we participate in deciding whether the cat is dead or alive. It is dead or alive if we look in the box.

The mathematical functions describing this experiment don't converge until you look in the box. Since no one found the box and it opened automatically, is a living dead (Vampire) cat now wondering around the banks of the Servern in Gloustershire?

Maria Sewell, a long time Gloustershire chess player, says "Yes! The towns folk call it the Beast of Gloustershire. It's been attacking people since the late fifties. It lives in shadows. It seems to phase out of existence when people hunt it only to phase back in again.

Billy Eveleigh a Gloustershire scholastic chess player, who has studied the Beast of Goustershire says "In the past 50 years there have been hundreds of recorded sightings of this supernatural cat elsewhere for example BEDFORDSHIRE, BERKSHIRE and BUCKINGHAMSHIRE .

Every time it attacks someone the constabulary ignore the clue of a putrefying cat carcass lying nearby. I know why it attacks people! I learned from Mary Shelley's book (Frankenstein).

If you are going to create a new type of life form, it will attack you if you don't create a mate for it. " Mohammed Hozzurbi a Wales Chess player says, " I would do the same experiment to my cat Fritz. She is quite and cleans all the time.

Fritz would be the perfect mate for George. But I couldn't even begin to try. I am told because of unfair religious profiling against people of Islamic decent in the U.K. It has made it impossible to buy radio active material here. Even in London where you can get a prescription for heroin !"

Draco Borjariu, president of the Draco Transylvania Chess Club ( Bran, Romania) comments, " If you love your cat, why let your curiosity kill the cat? Why can't we conduct this experiment on convicted murders? Preferably those involved in cannibalisim and blood drinking." For those of you who don't have a clue as to what quantum mechanics is about. I offer the case of White's King on g3 being checked by a Bishop on c7 then White blocking the check by moving a pawn two spaces from F2 to F4 only to have black take the pawn on while passing (enpassent) e4 x f3. Did the king ever get out of check? Yes and no. The pawn blocked the check and was intercepted before it reached F4 to block the check. You have a Living Dead King.

Our co editor Brad Zang has refused to allow a JCC investigation committee to be formed. He mentioned, " People might misconstrue this article as a formula for using quantum mechanics to make real Vampires."