Inside today’s Daily Journal…

Editor’s note: Today, Porter has turned the Journal over to his Porter & Co. colleague, analyst Ross Hendricks – editor of The Trading Club – who explains why even if the recently announced peace agreement between the U.S. and Iran holds, oil supplies, energy markets, and prices will remain tremendously disrupted.

Here’s Ross now…

In 1935, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposed a famous thought experiment that came to be known as the Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox.

The experiment highlights the bizarre nature of quantum physics, where particles exist in a superposition of all possible states until they are observed or measured, and only then does the probability distribution collapse into a definite state.

Schrodinger devised a scenario where a cat is sealed in a box along with radioactive material, a Geiger counter (for measuring radioactivity), a vial of poison, and a hammer. If the Geiger counter detects radioactive emission, it triggers the release of the hammer to shatter the vial, which kills the cat. But radioactive emission is a quantum event, governed by probability rather than certainty. This makes it impossible to determine whether radioactivity was released until opening the box and making the observation.

Thus Schrödinger proposed that the cat inside the sealed box must also exist in a superposition: simultaneously alive and dead until someone opens the box and looks.

The paradox was meant as an exercise in reductio ad absurdum to highlight the strange reality of quantum physics which, when taken to the extreme, results in a living creature being both dead and alive at the same time. It has since become one of the most enduring thought experiments in the philosophy of physics, forcing scientists to grapple with the nature of reality and the boundary between the quantum and classical worlds.

But it turns out that it’s also the perfect analogy for the state of modern-day geopolitics.