Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

In this comic, an economist excitedly explains that every possible state of the economy can be defined using a wavefunction borrowed from quantum mechanics. His colleague asks if he has any evidence from observation and suggests they check. The final panel shows a newspaper headline: "ECONOMY COLLAPSES."

The joke is a physics pun based on the quantum mechanical concept of wavefunction collapse. In quantum mechanics, a system exists in a superposition of all possible states until it is observed, at which point the wavefunction "collapses" into a single definite state. Here, the economist has modeled the economy as a quantum wavefunction, so when they "observe" it to gather evidence, the wavefunction collapses -- and so does the economy. The comic also works as a dig at economists who borrow concepts from physics and apply them to economics without fully considering the consequences, a real trend in quantitative finance that has been blamed for various economic crises.