I looked at the coffee mug on the table. It was full. It was empty. It was a ceramic shard embedded in the drywall. According to the notebook, these weren’t three different mugs. It was one "state," a complex superposition of possibilities. I reached for the handle. My hand passed through the steam of the full cup and gripped the cold porcelain of the empty one.
When I finally opened my eyes, the world was singular again. The mug was just a mug. The door was just a door. But as I walked to my car, I didn't check the rearview mirror. I knew better than to look too closely at where I’d just been. Quantum mechanics. The theoretical minimum
Now, standing in the middle of a laboratory that was currently existing in three different states of renovation simultaneously, I realized I’d fallen through the floor. I looked at the coffee mug on the table
I felt the "Theoretical Minimum" of my own existence: a heart rate, a memory of a friend, and the math that held the atoms of my body in a tightly bound dance . It was a ceramic shard embedded in the drywall
This request appears to be inspired by the book Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum by Leonard Susskind and Art Friedman.
"It’s not everything," Art had told me before the accident. "It’s just what you need to survive. The bare essentials. The floor beneath which reality stops making sense."