Of course it happened!

This is a response to Red King's post Time Freak, on Fanatic Avocado s. (I was unsure on how to punctuate that...) Please read it first, or the following will make no sense.

This is one of those philosophical questions that the true answer to is "Who cares?" Either of the other answers (yes and no) will make no difference to our lives OR our ideas...

Besides, as philosophy is an offshoot of biology, which grew out of chemistry, which (as we all know) is basically physics for dummies; this can be answered with physics: Every action has a reaction.

If your mother didn't remember your sleep-trek, perhaps the large amount of turbulence caused by your (and I quote) 'very noisy milk consumption' shifted a larger body of air, which then was heated in your house, and rose into the sky.
Perhaps it then drifted and met up with some other weather patterns, altering their original path.
These small changes could perhaps have even caused the rainy weather we are having, or a storm in Mexico.
We don't know. The point is, even if no PERSON remembered your slurps, physics and the atoms around you certainly did. The atomic "ripples" you left are still spreading outward.

So, my answer:
Physics will not conform to any of the blind misgivings of philosophy. Your mother aside, what happened in the your kitchen that night HAPPENED. Regardless.

Schrödinger's Cat & other happy things...

Schrödinger (a physicist) put forward a rather fascinating paradox involving quantum stuff and wave forms. The reason he used a cat and not some other lab animal is because no one likes to have a dead cat on their hands, especially one that is both alive and dead at the same time.

My amazing diagram of Schrödinger's poor Cat in a Jigsaw-esk trap.

Schrödinger's paradox goes something like this: You place a cat, a Geiger counter, a single atom of an unstable element with a fairly short half-life (say Technetium-99 with a half-life of 6 hours), and a way of killing said cat in a box secure from cosmological interference (stray radioactivity). You then hook the Geiger counter up to the killing thing (Schrödinger "used" poison) so that if the atom decays the Geiger counter will detect it, set the poison off, and kill the cat. Technetium-99 has a half-life of 6 hours, which means that every 6 hours half of it (by mass) decays into a lower energy isotope, which in this case is Ruthenium-99. During the decaying process, each atom that decays (its completely random) gives off a beta particle and gamma radiation. This is what the Geiger counter picks up.

So the experiment is set up, what now? We now let it sit for 6 hours. Because we used a single atom of Technetium-99, with a half-life of 6 hours, there is a perfect 50% chance of the atom decaying and a 50% chance it did not. Hence a 50% chance of a dead cat and a 50% chance of a very hungry alive cat.

When you open the box, you discover what happened. If you have to deal with a dead cat or feed a live one. HOWEVER, while the box is closed, the cat is BOTH ALIVE AND DEAD at the same time. When you open the box the wave function, or probability, collapses and the cat becomes reality.

According to quantum mechanics (which still has not been disproved) a cat can be alive and dead at the same time. This is possible because its fate hinges on the atom, an atom which can be in both states at the same time.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.