schrodinger39s-hash
Explanation
The Joke
Two police officers are staring at a closed box labeled "experiment in progress." One asks "Do we arrest him?" and the other explains the dilemma: the suspect said he would only smoke marijuana if his Geiger counter detected an alpha particle. Since the radioactive decay is a quantum event, the marijuana smoking is entangled with a quantum outcome -- until someone opens the box and observes what happened, the suspect is in a superposition of having both smoked and not smoked the marijuana.
The caption reads: "Fun Fact: You can't arrest people for quantum crime."
The Humor
This is a riff on the famous Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment, in which a cat inside a sealed box is simultaneously alive and dead until observed, because its fate is tied to a quantum event (radioactive decay). Here, instead of a cat's life, it is the commission of a crime (smoking marijuana) that is placed in quantum superposition. The police are paralyzed because the crime both has and hasn't been committed, making it impossible to determine probable cause for an arrest without collapsing the wave function. The title "Schrodinger's Hash" is a pun combining Schrodinger's name with "hash," a slang term for cannabis.
References
- Schrodinger's Cat is a thought experiment proposed by physicist Erwin Schrodinger in 1935 to illustrate the absurdity of applying quantum superposition to macroscopic objects. A cat in a sealed box is simultaneously alive and dead until observed.
- Geiger counter and alpha particle: A Geiger counter detects ionizing radiation such as alpha particles emitted during radioactive decay -- the same triggering mechanism used in the original Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment.