Chol Hamo’ed — Days in Superposition

Today is Chol Hamo’ed Sukkot – the intermediate days between the first and the last days of the holiday of Sukkot. These days are not quite holidays, but they are not ordinary days either. They are a strange hybrid or a mixture of a holiday and mundane days. In physics, we have a word for that – the state of superposition. I’ve written about it in my article Pesach Sheini – in a State of Superposition. Not to repeat myself, I refer the reader to that article for background information. In short, in physics, we speak of states of the system. Say, one state of a dreidel may be spinning clockwise. Another state would be spinning counterclockwise. These are pure states. In quantum mechanics, a system could be in a mixed state. Say, [...]