Friday 5 February 2010

Quantum Politics

Aaah, lamb chops for tea. I like lamb. It's the nearest you can legally get to eating babies which is the ultimate goal of every smoker, drinker, and lover of salt-laden fatty food, according to the Righteous. But it's pointless to speculate about eating babies. I mean, red wine or white? There's nothing in Delia's books about it. But I digress. Already.


Quantum science is weird stuff, especially to us non-physicists. Some parts I can just about grasp, such as the impossibility of measuring both the velocity and location of a particle. If you fix a location, then a fixed location has no speed. If you measure speed, then it's moving so it has no fixed location.

I'm sure it's really much more complicated than that but what the hell. It's not my job to know those things.

One of the many things about quantum physics that makes my head spin is the idea that a particle can exist in two forms simultaneously, and only becomes fixed in one form or the other when you look at it. How does it decide which form to fix itself into? There's a school of thought that says it doesn't, that the observer decides. That is a terrible responsibility, especially for the one who first looked at the Brown Gorgon. According to quantum physics, he is their fault.

For a long time, I have flipped between the idea that our politicians are all clever calculators following a master plan, and the idea that they are all so incredibly stupid that someone else has to constantly remind them of the existence of gravity to stop them floating away (whoever is doing that, please stop). They existed in both forms simultaneously. Quantum politicians.

Channel 4 have looked at Jim Devine and he has set into one of his quantum forms.

It's not the clever form.

If the theory that the observer decides the form is correct, could Channel 4 hurry up and look at the rest of them? Then we can get Nurse to lead them all away to play together at the Shady Green Rest Home for Weary Minds.

Then we can give the gravity-reminding guy the day off.

10 comments:

Snowolf said...

One of the more bizarre moments of television I've ever seen.

The public gallery and jurors' box is likely to ring out with boos like the cheap seats at Eastbourne municipal baths when Giant Haystacks entered the ring as soon as he walks into the court room, if he presents and muddles like that, it'll be one of the shortest trials in history. He'll be guilty before the judge has said 'good morning' and sat down.

I wonder how long it will take the Lord Chancellor to decide that this case is too complicated for a jury of little people to decide guilt or innocence and insert a pliant judge on the bench instead?

hangemall said...

Sorry to correct you L-I, but I think you will find that if you can fix the position of a particle exactly, i.e. with complete certainty, then its *momentum* is completely uncertain, and vice versa.

It's your *knowledge* of what's happening, not what is *actually* happening that is uncertain. This is the uncertainty principle.

Translated into politics, if the Gorgon or anyone else gives a definite "yes" or "no" then then the real truth is completely uncertain.

If the Gorgon, etc, gives an evasive answer, then you can be certain that he is uncertain whether he uncertain or not.

I hope I have made this clear.

Leg-iron said...

Snowolf - it's an incredible video whe you realise that he's one of those who makes our laws! All those idiotic little laws - now we know why.

Hangemall - no problem. I spent years calling it the Hindenberg uncertainty principle, which states that if you fill an airship with hydrogen and have a smoking section, you never know when it's just going to go bang.

The Gorgon is a perfect quantum politician. Nobody has so far worked out whether his answers are, in fact, answers, or some previously unknown form of communication. They refuse to collapse into any recognisable form no matter how hard you stare at them.

Perhaps we should stick him in the LHC and see what happens.

Anonymous said...

Labour sought verbal manipulators for candidates, so that's what they got. The specimen under the microscope is of the Muppet species, but fits the bill, nevertheless.

As to physics, I'm more in the dark than you are. I'd've thought that our physical detection systems prevent us from understanding what we cannot see because we build our logic on that which we can. So we reject that which does not make sense in our world.

Schrödinger's Cat said...

Can you believe that there are people, walking among us, who will vote for this bunch of thieves in the next election.

cornyborny said...

Yep. I can. It's because (at least in the case of those I know) they have a preformed and unshakeable idea of what Labour are, based on who knows what: a half-remembered soundbite from forty years ago; a melange of left wing propaganda from a biased media that relentlessly turns reality upside down and reinforces their skewed worldview. Whatever, they simply don't look and listen and think about things as they really are today.

Prodicus said...

I begin to understand the Scottish Labour Party a little better. With non-sentient lumps of meat like Devine on the backbenches, a determined man in possession of a mind, no matter how small or malign, will shine like the proverbial city on a hill. By surrounding himself with and protecting such pre-cerebral lobby-fodder he is assured of power. For a while.

cornyborny said...

Which, now I think of it, is exactly like the theory Fausty describes above: "we reject that which does not make sense in our world."

Thanks, general populace, for ensuring a perennial two party system with your received wisdom and lazy assumptions.

Ed P said...

A great video for bulimics! Can I have a new keyboard and screen now please?
The big mystery is how this pathetic, dumb (and bloody ugly) excuse for humanity was selected and elected - and what that says about his constituents?

Chris said...

But it's pointless to speculate about eating babies. I mean, red wine or white?

Well, they're supposed to be the other white meat...

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