[WikiEN-l] fictional categories

[stevertigo]

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 8:43 PM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 12:37 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Schroedinger's cat very definitely is fictitious; it's not an
>> experiment you can actually do and get an alive/dead cat that you can
>> actually see, you would get either an alive cat, or a dead cat.
>
> I agree with the statement that it should not be in that category.
> Essentially, because schrodinger's cat is not a cat. Felix the Cat is
> a fictional cat. Simba the lion is a fictional cat, in a broader
> sense. Schrodinger's cat is a concept in physics that has nothing to
> do with cats or fiction. There is no notable fiction in which
> Schrodinger's cat features heavily, for example.
>
> To the OP: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. One bad
> category member does not justify nuking an entire family of
> categories.

Hold on. Schroedinger's Cat is not actually a fictional cat (its more
of a hypothetical cat), but that does not mean that its categorization
there is improper. Sometimes these things can be dealt with on a
case-by-case basis. The idea of categorizing a hypothetical cat within
the context of a fictional cat is not too far out of bounds, and does
not represent any agenda other than to increase its visibility.
Someone who might be interested in cats might find the usage of a cat
in a science metaphor interesting, and perhaps find it an introduction
to the science behind the hypothesis - in this case the necessity to
regard superpositions as actual phenomena.

-Stevertigo
"Fireflies illuminate our play...