Quantum Mechanics

What impossible things you get up to when I am not looking, said Pliny the Elder. RAT DIV-A indeed! Kung Fu shoes! Osoto-gari!

You should pay more attention, I said. They are not such impossible things.

Perhaps not, said Pliny, I am reminded of quantum mechanics. I attended a lecture last night on subatomic particles, and learned that scientists believe electrons behave in just such a way.

What way? I asked.

In this way, that when they are unobserved they are capable of doing impossible things.

What sort of impossible things? I asked.

No one knows, said Pliny. Because they are unobserved.

That doesn't make sense, I scoffed.

That is what I thought, said Pliny, but we were presented with several examples. The first being this: an elderly couple arrived several minutes late to the lecture. They had been orbiting around outside and suddenly decided to come in. It struck me, and doubtless the rest of us, that the couple could be likened to electrons and that we inside had no way of predicting by which of the two doors they would choose to enter.

That makes sense, I agreed. What else?

This one is good, said Pliny. The professor had a series of slides which he projected on to a screen. The tops of all his slides were missing. Thus we were unable to observe some crucial pieces of information. For example, the name of Ernest Rutherford, so that we did not know who it was that discovered the atom was not the basic component of matter, and the words inside the speech bubble of a cartoon cow, which made the joke about the uncertainty principle completely incomprehensible.

Ah, I said. I see. But wasn't the lecturer a physics professor? Was he incapable of adjusting his slides?

I wondered about that, said Pliny. He had been a Chief Scientist, too, in an overseas country, for some unobservable length of time.