55 thoughts on “do they wear plaid in china? or leather in bombay?”

1. Shroedinger was one of the early researchers into Quantum Mechanics. The hardest thing to grasp about QM is the fact that it is impossible to precisely observe any individual quantum object (like an atom, electron, or photon). Instead, you can only take individual measurements of individual objects, and taking a measurement disturbs the object meaning whatever measurement you just took immediately becomes invalid. This leads to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and the weird way of looking at the universe that QM forces on those who study it.
   Shrodinger’s Cat is a fictional victim of possible murder found in a thought experiment of Shrodinger’s designed to illustrate quantum weirdness. The basic setup is you have a cat isolated from the rest of reality inside a box. In the box with a cat is a single radioactive atom with a known half-life, and a dose of poison that will be released on the cat when the atom decays. Poor cat — I wonder what Shrodinger had against them? Anyway, say the half-life of the atom is 10 minutes. So, after 10 minutes have passed, there is a 50% chance it has decayed, triggering the release of the fatal poison.
   However, because the experiment is unobservable, there is no way of knowing if the cat is alive or dead. The only thing you can say about the cat is that there is a 50% chance it’s alive and a 50% chance it’s dead. Quantum Mechanics calls this a “superposition of states” which is a fancy way of saying “it could be one, it could be the other, and we can’t know for sure which it is until we take a peek”.
   Having a properly scientific mind means you can’t make any assumptions about the state of the cat. It is incorrect to say the cat is alive, and it’s incorrect to say that it’s dead. You just don’t know until you open the box. This way of thinking allows for all of the weirdness you see coming out of QM these days, like the various “many worlds” theorems that say that ever quantum event splits the universe into parallel universes. So, under a Many Worlds interpretation of QM, Shrodinger’s Cat is alive in one universe and dead in a parallel universe, and we’ll never have access to the other universe.
   Once you open the box and see if the cat is alive or dead (QM doesn’t allow for the superposition of states to survive observation, so there’s no chance you’ll ever see a zombie cat being both dead and alive at once), you’ll have “collapsed the wave function” and observed that one or the other possible results have occurred.
   The whole idea behind Shrodinger’s Cat is that it is an analogy, a philosophical experiment carried out in the mind. No cats were (or were not) harmed in the making of this comment.

2. I own the SQL statement shirt. It’s one of my favorite geek shirts, and sometimes people ask me what it means. I was wearing that shirt when I met Wil at a book signing. I must have imprinted it on his subconscious, and he buys it like a year later. Yeah that’s it.

3. Thank you to Vex for the cat explanation…now who can yeild the geek code translation? Users have no clue? is that it? I think that hurts…I USE my computer to read Wil’s blog.
   No hard feelings…saw you on the 100 greatest child stars! You beat out Jerry O’Connell. We are so proud.

4. You: out of T-shirts
   Us: Many surplus tees from ChimaeraCons 2004 and 2005, need to raise funds for ChimaeraCon2006.
   Want one, at the bargain price of $10 (black and white design) or $15 (color)?
   You know where to email me.
   Gilder

5. Very funny about putting the SQL shirt on backwards! Classic!
   It reminds me of that geek saying, “People who don’t know SQL (pronounced SEE-QUEL) say S-Q-L”

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