What's In the F@cking Box?! (Or: What Quantum Mechanics and Art Have in Common)
It's impossible to pretend away the fact that what we create changes once it interacts with the rest of the world...but what if we embrace that?
Brad Pitt is standing in the desert outside Los Angeles, shouting at Morgan Freeman to tell him what’s in a box that’s just been delivered to them by a FedEx guy who deserved but didn’t get a big tip for driving all the way out here to the middle of nowhere. Pitt’s character suspects the answer is the decapitated head of his wife, but he needs to know for sure because, come on, who wouldn’t want to know if his wife’s decapitated head is or isn’t in a box? It’s one of the most horrifying moments I’ve ever seen on a movie screen.
“What’s in the box?” he cries out, his face twisting with anguish. “What’s in the fucking box?”
Everything you’re about to read won’t make any sense…until it does. And when it does, you might just find yourself embracing the unknown in your storytelling.
Do you know the thought experiment called “Schrödinger’s cat”? I learned it in grade school, which in hindsight seems a bit mad, trying to teach such young children about quantum physics. But that’s what the experiment is, an attempt to illustrate the paradox that is known as quantum superposition.
If you don’t know, quantum superposition is the idea that a quantum particle can exist in mutually exclusive conditions at once that, until observed, won’t settle on being one thing or the other. For example, a photon can be polarized so that the electric field inside it wriggles vertically, horizontally, or even both ways – all at the exact same time. It’s essentially a photon with multiple personality disorder.
According to the Copenhagen interpretation, a quantum system remains in such superposition until it interacts with or is measured — until it is observed — by the external world in some way. When this happens, the superposition decides on one of its many possible states.
In Edwin Schrödinger’s thought experiment, there is a cat in a sealed box with a flask of poison, a radioactive source, and an internal monitor. If the monitor detects radioactivity, the flask releases the poison and the cat dies. But you would never know which state the cat is actually in because the monitor doesn’t alert you either way. In other words, it is simultaneously alive and dead because it cannot be either until you, a human observer, open the box and look inside to find out.
It might even be said you decided the cat’s fate.
