[Porn Week] Science Spoofs Porn: Schrödinger’s Cat, Super Positions, and Heisenberg

Introduction

When approached to submit material for LoyarBurok’s Porn Week, I thought, why not leverage one of the most powerful drivers to communicate some neat scientific concepts in a cartoon strip.

Adolescents (and most adults) will do and learn anything to get porn. The Internet and computer technologies have grown like wildfire because of this.

Porn spoofs a lot of blockbuster movies, e.g., On Golden Blonde, Shaving Ryan’s Privates, Romeo In Juliet.

So I figured, it’s about time Science Does Porn!

I hope the comic strips manage to communicate some neat scientific concepts, or spark some interest to learn more (perhaps from Professors Google & Wiki!).

NOTE: I’ve also included some SIMPLIFIED EXPLAINATIONS based on my own interpretations of some of the theories to go with the cartoons. These interpretations should not be used as any sort of academic or professional reference. In some cases, it is possible that I’ve oversimplified or erred due to my own lay interpretation of some of the more complex scientific concepts. If I have erred, forgive me, and feel free to add a correction in the comments section.

Schrodinger’s Cat

Newtonian/classical physics provided neat descriptions about how fairly large objects interacted physically with each other and with forces, like gravitational and magnetic fields. This allowed people to build cars, ships, trains so they could get around faster, cannons, guns and other projectile weapons so they could maim and kill each other more efficiently.

However, this was not enough. Newtonian and classical physics did not allow people to download and watch porn.

In the dawning of the 20th century, scientists found that at very small scales, classical models didn’t work very well to describe matter, energy and their interactions. This necessitated the understanding of how atoms WORKED and how the electrons around them could be leveraged to store and exchange nude pictures on computers and iPhones.

Super Positions

At the atomic and sub atomic levels, matter, energy, even space and time seemed to behave in a very bizarre manner. For example, an electron, could behave either as a particle of matter or a wave.

Another thing that was completely bizarre was at these scales, MATTER APPEARED TO KNOW WE WERE WATCHING IT.

Lets anthropomorphize an electron into a Punk Rock Hipster called Bob.

Bob went to all the punk rock gigs, always wore a RAMONES or CBGBs t-shirt (distressed, of course), hung out at Joe Kidd’s Ricecooker record store and bought 7″ vinyl singles of some defunct Burmese band who only formed long enough to record 2 songs in their mom’s basement.

NOTE: Joe Kidd, one of the godfathers of Malaysian Punk Rock, is THE OBSERVER in this analogy.

Bob, had a dark secret. He also loved Maroon 5, Micheal Learns to Rock and even post Joshua Tree U2. BUT NO ONE KNEW THIS. Not even JOE KIDD.

Imagine Bob in his enclosed, black curtained, soundproof room. With his vinyl, CDs and MP3s; RAMONES, New York Dolls, Stooges, MC5, Maroon 5 and MLTR.

What album or track would he be listening to?

The Stooges Raw Power, or MLTR live at the Malaysian Bar Council’s Annual Dinner and Karaoke Extravanganza bootleg?

As long as Bob is isolated in his room, we have no idea WHAT he’s listening to.

Hence, for all intents and purposes, we can assume Bob MAY BE listening to any of ALL THE MUSIC HE IS IN POSSESION OF.

Adding all the possibilities up, or in this case, compiling all his musical preferences into a master playlist is normally referred to as SUPERPOSITION.

However, imagine Joe Kidd came knocking at his door, to share the latest Mission of Burma remastered album. What would happen?

If Bob WERE listening to Maroon 5, or MLTR, he’d rip that crap out of the player and put on some Black Flag, or Germs in time before Joe came in.

See? When Joe came to OBSERVE BOB, he would only SEE Bob in Punk Rock mode. All the other musical options COLLAPSED and hid themselves.

To summarize:

a) When Joe is not watching, Bob loads up a playlist that contains both good AND horrible music.

b) When Joe watches Bob, he only listens to good music

OK, so if we translate that analogy to an electron, the type of song (good or bad) would be analogous to an electron’s location in an atom. Based on this analogy, when unobserved, the electron could be EVERYWHERE, instantaneously! SUPERPOSITION!

Observing the electron collapses all the possible locations, into a single location.

What’s happened to all the other possibilities? There are many interpretations, for example the Multiverse theory. Everytime a decision is made, the observed and observer create a new branch of reality or a new Universe. The other states are relegated to OTHER UNIVERSES. In some alternate universe, Bob doesn’t change the music in time and Joe finds out that Bob is a poseur.

In Schrodinger’s time Punk Rock had not yet been invented, so he could not use this amazing analogy. However, cats HAD been invented by then. Thus, he articulated his metaphor for Superposition (and another neat concept called Entanglement) in his Schrodinger’s Cat Thought Experiment. Your homework assignment, is to look this up in your local library.

Heisenberg

Now, there was another scientist also working on trying to figure out how electrons behaved. Werner Heisenberg.

Heisenberg: “What Schrödinger writes about the visualisability of his theory […] is crap.”

OK, so that sums up what Heisenberg thought about Schrödinger. Heisenberg developed a different model to determine an electron’s mass, position, velocity or musical taste. He stated that the more accurate measurements you get on one variable, say the mass, will result in less accuracy in other measurements, position, velocity. This is often referred to as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and he came up with some fairly complex equations to account for this uncertainty.

It should be noted, that this concept had even made its way in popular culture. In Star Trek, people get around using a “Transporter”, a device that somehow deconstructs and converts you into energy, transmits you wirelessly across space, then reconstructs you at your destination. In order to reconstruct you, the Transporter needs to first record the location of all your atoms – nuclei, electrons included, then place them back in the same arrangment. In one episode, it was learnt that one critical component of the Transporter was the Heisenberg Compensator. I figure if this wasn’t working correctly, Kirk may arrive at his destination as a puddle of wet gunk, and wouldn’t be able to have sex with the green amphibian chick he met in the Delta Quadrant bar.

Rafil Elyas is a chemical engineer. He is also one third of the genius that is The Panda Head Curry? who be making up for boycotting Nurulpalooza Penang 2011 at their next show: The Panda Head Curry?: Tigalagi at Arts For Grabs, The Annexe Gallery.

They will be performing their latest release ‘Straight Pride:The World is My Closet’ along with previous albums ‘1000 Homo Humpbacks’ and ‘Arsetronauts & Arseteroids’ in their entirety.

Look out for more “Science Spoofs Porn” tomorrow!