At the moment I am reading the excellent book "The Pragmatic Programmer" written by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. Although I have only reached page 50 I can by now definitely recommend this book. There is one paragraph on page 47 that I would like to share with you.
Erwin Schrödinger, who was an Austrian pshysicist and expert in Quantum Mechanics, proposed in 1935 the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment to illustrate a paradox. In the book "The Pragmatic Programmer" the Schrödinger's cat is used to illustrate that there are no final decisions and that each decision you make will result in a different version.
"Suppose you have a cat in a closed box, along with a radioactive particle. The particle has exactly a 50% chance of fissioning into two. If it does, the cat will be killed. If it doesn't, the cat will be okay. So, is the cat dead or alive? According to Schrödinger, the correct answer is both. Every time a subnuclear reaction takes place that has two possible outcomes, the universe is cloned. In one, the event occurred, in the other it didn't. The cat is alive in one universe, dead in another. Only when you open the box do you know which universe you are in."
The book continues by asking the question: How many possible futures can your code support?
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Cross-posted from
The .NET Aficionado