Schroedinger's fetus
I could use something a little lighthearted right about now, so here's some Amusing Geekery:
A couple of weeks before the birth of his second daughter, I asked my previously featured co-worker what name they had selected for her.
"I can't tell you! It'll jinx us!"
"Jinx you?"
"Yeah, if we tell you the girl's name, she's come out a boy!"
I laughed, but a couple of days ago I was thinking about it again.
"Hmmm," I thought, "I didn't think that pregnancy was a model for Schroedinger's Cat!"
If you're not familiar with this unfortunate feline, here's a brief introduction to the famous model for quantum physics: a cat is sharing a box with some tenuously-contained deadly gas (cyanide, for example). This release of this gas is dependent upon a completely random and unpredictable event (such as nuclear decay of a radioactive isotope). You have no way of knowing whether or not the gas has been released, therefore you have no way of knowing whether the cat is alive or dead. Until you open the box and take a look (analogous to taking a measurement of a system) thereby forcing one of the states to be true, the cat is actually 50% alive, 50% dead.
So what my co-worker was telling me was that the fetus was 50% girl, 50% boy, until such a time that a measurement was made (a measurement being birth or revelation of the selected name), and the wave function would collapse on a specific gender. Who knew that such rapid changes could happen to your fetus' biology in utero -- especially so late in the term?
I guess you learn something new every day.
A couple of weeks before the birth of his second daughter, I asked my previously featured co-worker what name they had selected for her.
"I can't tell you! It'll jinx us!"
"Jinx you?"
"Yeah, if we tell you the girl's name, she's come out a boy!"
I laughed, but a couple of days ago I was thinking about it again.
"Hmmm," I thought, "I didn't think that pregnancy was a model for Schroedinger's Cat!"
If you're not familiar with this unfortunate feline, here's a brief introduction to the famous model for quantum physics: a cat is sharing a box with some tenuously-contained deadly gas (cyanide, for example). This release of this gas is dependent upon a completely random and unpredictable event (such as nuclear decay of a radioactive isotope). You have no way of knowing whether or not the gas has been released, therefore you have no way of knowing whether the cat is alive or dead. Until you open the box and take a look (analogous to taking a measurement of a system) thereby forcing one of the states to be true, the cat is actually 50% alive, 50% dead.
So what my co-worker was telling me was that the fetus was 50% girl, 50% boy, until such a time that a measurement was made (a measurement being birth or revelation of the selected name), and the wave function would collapse on a specific gender. Who knew that such rapid changes could happen to your fetus' biology in utero -- especially so late in the term?
I guess you learn something new every day.