TV, the Big Bang, and Schrödinger

A few of my friends have gone on (and on) about the TV show, The Big Bang. So I watched a couple of episodes on the computer. It’s ok, I guess.

The finale, which I’m about to rant about, was actually pretty funny, and ended on a satisfying note. I liked it.

But.

It’s supposed to be all geeky and have sciency stuff in it, and one particular character (a theoretical physicist) is supposed to be extremely accurate and precise in everything he says. He does correct the common mistake about what a light-year is (bitched about previously in weeklyrob).

So that’s good.

But then he went and misrepresented the whole idea of Schrödinger’s cat. The guy was supposedly speaking off-the-cuff, but happened to quote, EXACTLY, a part of the Schrödinger’s cat article in wikipedia. (No, I won’t link to wikipedia.) I guess we know where the writers are getting their stuff.

Anyway, that bit that they got from wikipedia happens to be misleading.

Here’s the offending paragraph:

“In simple terms, the thought problem involves a cat placed in an opaque box with a sealed vial of poison that will break open at an uncertain time. Since no one knows when or if the poison has been released, until the box is opened, the cat might be thought of as both alive and dead, until the box is opened, and the cat is observed by someone else.”

This sounds as though we’re talking about some fluffy bit of freshman blow-your-mind-smoke-a-bowl-maybe-we’re-all-part-of god’s-brain crap. We don’t know whether the cat is alive or dead, so it might be thought of as both. Big deal. It might be thought of as anything we want. So what?

But that’s not the point at all.

Schrödinger was responding to what quantum theorists were saying about the actual behavior of the universe. Physical, testable, demonstrable behavior. They were saying that, based on all the data they had, and every test they had done, a given particle was literally in two states at once until observed. Once observed, the particle would “collapse” into one state.

Go elsewhere for more explanation, but the point is the word literally. It’s not a matter of, “we can think of it as both, since we don’t really know.” It was, “this particle seems to literally BE both, until we look.”

And Schrödinger, back in the day, thought that was ridiculous. So he came up with a thought experiment in which, through some ingenious workings, a cat would die or live depending on the state of a given particle.

The quantum people said that the particle was literally in both states until observed, so he said: Taken to the logical conclusion, you people are trying to tell me that the cat is alive AND dead until observed? It exists in both states? You’re nuts.

This was before the mountain of data backing up all the predictions of quantum theory. [Not that we know what would happen with the cat. The universe might consider a cat an observer.]

So, that bugged me. A show about a theoretical physicist really should do better, even though it’s just a sit-com and is basically a love story like most other sit-coms.