Schrodinger's bag

So, having experienced that feeling of loss at the baggage carousel when your bag is conspicuous by its absence, I find myself in that strange state of existence identified by the visionary scientist Schr?dinger.

In a famous thought experiment related to radioactive decay (and cat lovers stop reading now!) he envisaged a possible quantum state where a cat, placed in a sealed box with a decaying radioactive substance and a poison –which can be triggered by the random radioactive decay – achieves the state of both being alive and being dead (the Copenhagen interpretation); such is the strangeness of quantum interaction.

However the thought experiment (no cats were actually harmed) was to illustrate the absurdity of the supposition.

My bag – and the guilty airline shall not yet be named – has achieved a similar state. According to the airline systems the bag is not lost, but yet it is not found. It is in the Schr?dinger state of being both found and not found.

I find myself wondering about parallel universes in which in one universe the bag is recovered and restored to its rightful owner, and in another universe the bag is lost for ever. And yet I know that, in the global network of airports and airlines, somewhere in the world there sits a bag mewing for its owner.