It is impossible to communicate the anguish of impossibility, even though—or because—it is the central axis of what we quaintly, if unaquaintedly, refer to as reality. Coming to understand the nature of impossibility is the essence of education. This is no doubt why Freud said that education is one of the three impossible professions. The other two are governing and conducting a psychoanalysis. Freud’s successor Lacan went further, and recognized that the anguish that brings someone to psychoanalysis is nothing but the impossibility of love, for which there is no cure. He affirmed that impossibility in his famous apothegm, “il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel” (there is no sexual relation).

But such assertions of the existence of specific dimensions of impossibility evade the radical ubiquity of impossibility as the hallmark of existence tout court. Impossibility is always and everywhere. There is no relation of any kind—not just sexual. Even friendships are based on illusion. No colleagues are really in the same league. Our words are riddled with ambiguities, our desires with unconscious conflicts and counter-desires. Our identities are inauthentic. We are imitations of imitations. Finding oneself is impossible. Discovering truth is impossible. There is no credible knowledge. No scientific theory lasts for very long (although its lifespan can be prolonged by being turned into an ideological given; in other words, a religious belief, as has happened with Darwinism—which cannot explain a long list of scientific observations, ranging from the Cambrian explosion to the fact of eco-systems to the irreducible complexity of even the most apparently simple microbiological structure). The impossibility of understanding the world or each other or oneself is at least useful in deflating the arrogance and grandiosity of the narcissistic ego. Unfortunately, narcissists can easily remain in denial of their own impossibility for a long time, until karma catches up with them.

In 1935, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposed a thought experiment in which a live cat was placed in a sealed box together with a mechanism that could be triggered by a quantum event—the decay of a subatomic particle that had a certain probability of happening—that would kill the cat when it occurred. According to quantum theory, subatomic particles can be in a condition of superposition—in other words, the particle can be in two states at once, until observed. Thus, the killing mechanism in the box could be both triggered and not triggered. So, Schrödinger wondered: Could the cat be both alive and dead at the same time?

For some thinkers, including Einstein, this was obviously impossible, a reductio ad absurdum. But for others, it was clear that quantum physics points to just this possibility. To explain such theoretical high strangeness, many theories have since emerged, including the possibility of parallel universes.

But Schrödinger’s cat has today emerged from its box, and is dead-and-alive and well and smiling uncannily at us, like another cat from Cheshire, from every point of our macro-reality. We are clearly now passing through an extraordinary moment of the revelation of quantum superposition in our phenomenal plane.