Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

The comic presents a variation on the famous Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment. In the original, a cat is placed in a sealed chamber with a radioactive source that may or may not trigger a mechanism to kill the cat, leaving the cat in a quantum superposition of alive and dead until observed. Here, a "Professor Tippett" replaces the cat with a political pundit. If the radiation source emits in one direction, the pundit is told that his own party passed a bill. If it emits in the other direction, he is told the opposing party passed the same bill.

Until someone observes the outcome, the pundit exists in a superposition of both opposing and favoring the bill. The caption describes this as Professor Tippett proposing the existence of "Quantum Hypocrisy."

The Humor

The joke skewers political pundits who form their opinions not based on the actual content of legislation but entirely based on which party proposed it. A pundit would praise a bill passed by their own party and condemn the exact same bill if passed by the opposing party. By framing this in the language of quantum mechanics, the comic elevates a common observation about partisan hypocrisy into a mock-scientific principle. The title "gedankendouche" is itself a portmanteau of "Gedankenexperiment" (the German word for "thought experiment," used in physics) and "douche" (slang for a contemptible person), neatly capturing the comic's blend of physics and political satire.

References

The comic is a parody of Schrodinger's Cat, a thought experiment devised by physicist Erwin Schrodinger in 1935 to illustrate the apparent absurdity of applying quantum superposition to everyday objects. In quantum mechanics, a particle can exist in multiple states simultaneously until measured. The comic applies this principle to political commentary, satirizing the well-documented tendency of partisans to evaluate identical policies differently depending on which party endorses them -- a phenomenon studied in political science research on motivated reasoning.