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JoanMartorell

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Probabilistic irony, a cat and a scruffy hair scientists quote.

Back in the good old days in my university, the subject 'Quantum Physics' final exam was a multiple choice.  

Well, for those of you who are not familiar with the subject, it's about the behavior of tiny particles and energy packages called 'quantum' - such as light, X-rays, microwaves, and any other kind of radiation that's know - . It doesn't seem so difficult, at first; but when you realize that this tiny pieces of  crap don't follow any simple rule established by common sense. For example, if you look an electron at any given time you can't know it's exact position and it's speed at the same time, if you know it's exact position you can't measure its speed, and if you know it's exact speed, you realize that the electron is in every place of the universe and in none at the same time. To make matter worse, every time we measure its state we change it with almost no chance of changing it back to its original state!!!   

Quantum physics can also make a cat being dead and alive at the same time. Think of a cat, lets cal it Mr. Schrödinger in honor of this 'mental experiment' creator, now imagine a thick lead box with some kind of radioactive material inside and a bottle of instantaneous cats' poison attached to a mechanism that breaks the bottle if it detects radiation inside(please do not try this at home, this is just a mental experiment not a real one( unless you can find a quantum cat) ). Now let's see what happens if we put Mr. Schrödinger in the box and close it tightly. Well, at a given time the radioactive material can release a particle or not, if it does is the cat-killer mechanism actives and Mr. Schrödinger becomes worms' food, and if it doesn't Mr. Schrödinger can live another day doing normal cat's stuff. As we can't see Mr. Schrödinger, we don't know if  he's dead or alive. However, given a certain time we can assume that the radiative material had released a particle and that it had not at the same time, so the cat-killer mechanism was and was not activated at the same time, and as a result our dear hero Mr. Schrödinger is dead and alive at the same time!!!! One thing is sure, we can't know anything until we open this infernal machine, and watch what had happened, but by doing so we can trigger the particle release and become the killers of Mr. Schrödinger.(for more info visit Wikipedia or watch "The big bang Theory") 

It's an exact science that only give us foggy and capricious probabilistic results.  This makes many people unhappy, even Einstein(who ironically helped in its development) hated this theory so much that told one of his fellow physicists "God doesn't play dices with the universe." which takes us to the original state. One glorious day in which a man from my university had not studied for the quantum physics final exam, he took a dice and start rolling it during the exam to get the answers. He got a C+.  

I don't know which are the odds of passing a randomness science final exam by using a completely random method, but one thing it's sure the odds of the quantum physics final exam being a multiple choice again became null after this ironic roll of  the dice. 
 
 I hoped you've enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. Feel free to comment.
 
So long, and thank you for the fish.  

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