Sometimes as I cook with my older children we take a moment to discuss the great issues of our times and, after a quick foray this afternoon into the placebo effect and alternative medicines, my son and I decided to tackle the important matter of adapting Schrodinger’s famous quantum physics experiment to fit the perspective of our labrador/poodle cross Pippa.

As Pippa’s main and possibly only interest is in food, we decided to replace the cat with bacon, which would be placed in the same locked box with an atomic clock that, at the key random point of atomic decay, would now trigger a process that would perfectly grill the bacon. The bacon would therefore exist in a quantum probability cloud state of cooked/uncooked until the moment that the state was crystallised by Pippa’s observation of the bacon, obviously through smell rather than sight. (more…)