Donald Trump Treat’s COVID-19 Like Schrödinger’s Cat

There’s not just a slip of the tongue or a misstatement. Donald Trump has made quite often made the claim that the COVID numbers in the USA are so bad because of out testing. Here is an exact quote from June 15 (2020).

“If you don’t test, you don’t have any cases…If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases if any.”

OK, this is just plain silly — as everyone (well, just about everyone knows). Just because you don’t test doesn’t mean you have no cases, it just means you don’t KNOW about those cases.

If you use Trump’s line of reasoning, you could say stuff like this:

• If you don’t check your bank account, you will never run out of money.
• If you don’t test for diabetes, you will have very few cases of diabetes (OK, this is cheating since this is EXACTLY what he’s saying).
• If you don’t use a radar gun to check for speeding cars on the highway, no one will be speeding.

You get the idea, right?

But wait! There is indeed a case where “testing” makes a difference. Maybe Donald Trump is talking about something like the famous Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment.

This experiment is really a reflection of the quantum nature of reality. But in order to understand this Schrödinger’s cat thing — you need to first look at classical physics.