Physics humor

I'm not doing homework this afternoon on account of nice weather (I was just out juggling) and I needed to kill a few hours before I head off to the theater for work this evening. As a consequence, I've decided to add some more pictures.

When I was buying my books at the beginning of the semester I noticed that the back cover of one of them (see exhibit A) had a sleeping cat on it. "Aw... how cute," I thought. I turned it over to reveal a non-sleeping cat on the front cover (see Exhibit B).

I stopped to think for a minute: "Sleeping cat... awake cat... Quantum textbook...Aha!" So, of course the cat is supposed to be Schrodinger's Cat. The story of Schrodinger's cat for anyone unfamiliar with it is that Schrodinger was making fun of the interpretation of quantum mechanics in which one believes that a particle doesn't have a position until one goes to measure it. So he came up with a thought experiment where there's a cat in a box with a sealed vial of poison gas, a radioactive isotope and a hammer. If, during the time of the experiment, the isotope decays a mechanism will detect this and cause the hammer to break the vial thus releasing the poison gas and killing the feline. There is some known probability that the isotope will decay during the experiment, but there's no way to tell whether it has or not in one particular period of time without measuring the outcome (i.e. opening the box and checking on the cat). So Schrodinger pointed out that we would have to say that the cat was in a superposition of dead and alive states and it wouldn't decide which one to be until the box was opened. Clearly, Schrodinger had a warped sense of humor.

So getting back to my book, this means that the cat on the back isn't actually sleeping. It's dead. I have a textbook with a picture of a dead cat on it; it makes me laugh whenever I think about it. Clearly, I'm a physics major.