ENGL 3815 Survey of Popular Culture Fall 2013 PH 321 Dr. David Lavery

1. ENGL 3815 Survey of Popular Culture Fall 2013 PH 321 Dr. David Lavery

2. Survey of Popular Culture

3. Thinking Inside the Box: Heisenberg’s Indeterminancy Principle, the Paradox of Schrödinger’s Cat, and Television Nate Fisher, Jr.: Tell me, am I dead? Nate Fisher, Sr.: Yes. And no. In some places you’re dead, some you’re alive, in some places you never even existed, possibly, theoretically. --“Perfect Circles,” Six Feet Under Survey of Popular Culture

4. Greg Bear’s, ‘Schrödinger's Plague” Survey of Popular Culture

5. Schrödinger (not trusting my own humble English major’s ability to do so, I quote Bear’s account—speaking through mad scientist Goa) • ‘proposed linking quantum events to macrocosmic events. He suggested putting a cat in an enclosed box, and also a device which detect the decay of a single radioactive nucleus. Let's say the nucleus has a fifty-fifty chance of decaying in an arbitrary length of time. If it does decay, it triggers the device, which drops a hammer on a vial of cyanide, releasing the gas into the box and killing the cat.’ Survey of Popular Culture

6. So far, so good, but we would do well to recall that this thought experiment is customarily, justifiably referred to as ‘The Paradox of Schrödinger’s Cat.’ For • ‘The scientist conducting this experiment has no way of knowing whether the nucleus decayed or not without opening the box. Since the final state of the nucleus is not determined without first making a measurement, and the measurement in this case is the opening of the box to discover whether the cat is dead, Schrödinger suggested that the cat would find itself in an undetermined state, neither alive nor dead, but somewhere in between. Its fate is uncertain until a qualified observer opens the box.’ Survey of Popular Culture

7. In effect a lab-based reductio ad absurdum, Schrödinger’s paradox was intended to show that his younger, upstart colleague Heisenberg’s postulation that the nature of quantum reality is indeterminate or uncertain apart from the particular consciousness of a particular observer was simply unacceptable. Survey of Popular Culture

8. Bear, of course, has his mad scientist take Schrödinger’s protest one step further, enacting a real world version in which a lethal experimental virus is or is not released into the atmosphere, depending on the validity of Heisenbergian indeterminancy. If released, it will eradicate the species—deservedly Goa believes: ‘[I]f the best mankind can do is come up with an infuriating theory like this to explain the universe, then we should be willing to live or die by our belief in the theory’ (481). Survey of Popular Culture

9. Bear’s mind-bending tale is science fiction, of course—literary SF of the ‘hard’ variety, its extrapolation from a major 20th Century scientific controversy not at all surprising. But who could have foreseen Heisenberg and Schrödinger migrating with increasing prominence into both big and small screen fictions? • Hard Science Fiction: ‘Science fiction in which the technology or science portrayed in the story has been extrapolated from current scientific theories, especially in which the laws of nature (as understood at the time of writing) are not violated’ (Prucher 87). Survey of Popular Culture

10. Independent American cinema’s poster boys the Coen brothers, for example, have more than once turned to quantum physics to complicate their already convoluted narratives. In The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), for example, as I have discussed at length elsewhere (‘Secret Shit’ 142-44), a logorrhoeic lawyer named Freddy Riedenschneider (Tony Shalhoub) offers a hard-boiled version of Heisenberg in order to explain to a dim-witted barber his approach to his wife’s defense in a murder trial. Survey of Popular Culture

11. They got this guy, in Germany. Fritz something-or-other. Or is it? Maybe it's Werner. Anyway, he's got this theory, you wanna test something, you know, scientifically—how the planets go round the sun, what sunspots are made of, why the water comes out of the tap—well, you gotta look at it. But sometimes, you look at it, your looking ‘changes’ it. Ya can't know the reality of what happened, or what ‘would've’ happened if you hadden a stuck in your goddamn schnozz. So there ‘is’ no ‘what happened.’ Not in any sense that we can grasp with our puny minds. Because our minds . . . our minds get in the way. Looking at something changes it. They call it the ‘Uncertainty Principle.’ Sure, it sounds screwy, but even Einstein says the guy's on to something. (66-67) Survey of Popular Culture

12. Not the only Heisenberg cameo in the Coen corpus. In A Serious Man (2009) a scene opens on the World’s Largest Chalkboard filled with the Universe’s Most Complex Equation . . . Survey of Popular Culture

13. . . . as put-upon, Job-like physics professor Larry Gopknik (Michael Stuhlbarg) explains to a packed lecture hall: ‘and that means . . . so that ... from which we derive . . . and also . . . which lets us . . . and . . . Okay? The Uncertainty Principle. It proves we can't ever really know . . . what's going on. . . . But even if you can’t figure anything out, you’ll still be responsible for it on the mid-term’(93; my italics). Survey of Popular Culture

14. Earlier in the same film a certain quantum cat also puts it in an appearance. As Dr. Gopnik drones on, accompanied by more chalkboard scribbling, we hear (even if his near comatose students do not) the following: ‘You following this? . . . Okay? . . . So . . . Heh-heh . . . This part is exciting. . . . So, okay. So. So if that's that, then we can do this, right? Is that right? Isn't that right? And that's Schrödinger's paradox, right? Is the cat dead or is the cat not dead? Okay?’ (17; my italics). (Later he admits that he doesn’t really grasp “the cat.”) Survey of Popular Culture

15. A full decade before Fritz (or maybe it’s Werner) Heisenberg would grace a Coen brothers movie, he had already appeared in our living rooms, near the very end (in the 20th of 22 episodes in its second and final season) of the television landmark Twin Peaks. Only two episodes before Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) would enter the mysterious Black Lodge in pursuit of his beloved Annie Blackburne (Heather Graham) and her captor Earle (Kenneth Welsh) and emerge possessed by BOB, the pie and jo (coffee) obsessed FBI man would meet Annie at the Double R Cafe where the former nun had found a job slinging hash. As their conversation (written by Harley Peyton and Robert Engels) reveals, they would hit it off immediately, bonding over their mutual knowledge of quantum epistemology. Survey of Popular Culture

16. Cooper: There are those who believe in a scientific basis for attraction. It's chemical. Annie: Is that what this is? Cooper: I don't know. Is it possible to understand without perspective? Annie: I spent five years trying. Cooper: Faith. Annie: It's difficult for me. But I have faith in you. In us, as I understand it. Cooper: We are very much alike. Annie: It helps. Cooper: But we think too much. Annie: ‘What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’ Cooper: Heisenberg! Survey of Popular Culture

17. But until the 21st Century allusions to Schrödinger’s cat in prime-time were rare. Now, in a new millennium, ‘Heisenberg’ shows up as the assumed, soon legendary street name of high school chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston), the ‘cook’ of a beyond-perfect, blue ‘glass’ (crystal meth) on AMC’s Breaking Bad (2008- ). In shades and a Fedora, the mild-mannered Walt becomes a formidable player, Heisenberg, even if his moral universe is entirely indeterminate. Survey of Popular Culture

18. Now Heisenberg and Schrödinger (and his cat) are finding work everywhere in American television. It should not surprise us that Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady’s smash hit sitcom about science nerds, Big Bang Theory,would reference Schrödinger’s cat—but in the context of a romantic entanglement?In ‘The Tangerine Factor’ (1.17), the final episode of the first season, woman-across-the-hall Penny (Kaley Cuoco) is contemplating actually dating geeky physicist next door Leonard (Johnny Galecki) and makes the mistake of asking mega-obnoxious know-it-all Sheldon (Jim Parsons), Leonard’s roommate, for advice. As a possible way of understanding the couple’s prospects, Sheldon offers to the barely comprehending Penny his complex exposition of Schrödinger’sparadox. Until they actually date, he suggests, their relationship will be, like the cat, both alive and dead. Survey of Popular Culture

19. Later, Leonard himself brings up Schrödinger’s gedanken on his first date with Penny, who is now way too familiar with quantum cats, but he draws a very different message from the paradox, taking it to mean something more like ‘strike while the iron is hot’ and kissing Penny emphatically before their evening has even begun. Survey of Popular Culture

20. Schrödinger’s cat must have left quite an impression on Penny, however, for in ‘The Codpiece Topology’ (2.2), we overhear the following conversation between the aspiring actress and another, dim-bulb boyfriend: • Penny: No, it wasn’t my cat, it was an experiment designed by this guy named Schrödinger. • Eric: From the Charlie Brown cartoons? • Penny: No, he was some kind of scientist, let me start again. • Clearly not every television character can talk cat. Survey of Popular Culture

21. Or consider FlashForward, ABC’s total fail attempt to replicate Lost’s success as a serial drama. In ‘Scary Monsters and Super Creeps,’ its sixth episode, the character of Simon (Dominic Monaghan)—a major culprit in causing a worldwide blackout and glimpse into the future for almost the whole population of the planet—tries to seduce a woman on a train by quizzing her about . . . Schrödinger's cat. It’s not a particularly memorable scene, but nothing about the series was. Survey of Popular Culture

22. In a first season (2009) episode of the clever, heavy-in-PST (prolonged sexual tension) ABC crime dramedy Castle (‘A Chill Goes Through Her Veins’ [1.5]), the show’s eponymous hero, a bestselling author of mystery fiction now attached to New York homicide investigators led by Det. Kate Beckett, engages in the following exchange with Det. Ryan (Seamus Deaver): • Castle: People don't disappear off the face of the earth. • Ryan: Sure they do. Quantum physics, alien abductions, Schrödinger's cat. One minute you're getting a hot dog in the park, the next you're fighting off Sleestaks on the far side of a dimensional rift. (my italics) Survey of Popular Culture

23. Such intertextual play as Ryan’s reference to the 1970s kids show Land of the Lost is fairly typical on Andrew Marlowe’s witty series. In one episode, after all, Castle dresses up for Halloween as Captain Mal Reynolds from the cancelled series Firefly (2002), a role the actor Nathan Fillion played in another universe. We never learn, however, how an NYPD detective came by his familiarity with quantum physics. Survey of Popular Culture

24. The Heisenberg/Schrödinger'scraze—or should we call it a meme?—actually began early in the century—in 2003—with Six Feet Under’s ‘Perfect Circles’ (3.1), quantum TV’s masterpiece. Working from a script by series creator Alan Ball, Rodrigo Garcia—the son of Magical Realism’s patriarch and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Márquez—directed ‘Circles,’ the mind-blowing opening sequence of which begins where Season Two left off, with Nate Fisher, Jr. (Peter Krausse) under the knife, brain surgeons operating on his arteriovenous malformation (AVM). Things are not going well (the surgeon asks for aneurysm clamps) . . . Survey of Popular Culture

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27. Nate Fisher Sr.’s Questions to Nate Jr. 1. Do you believe that your consciousness affects the behaviour of subatomic particles? 2. Do you believe that particles move backward and forward in time and appear in all possible places at once. 3. Do you believe that the universe is constantly splitting into billions of different parallel universes? Survey of Popular Culture

28. Survey of Popular Culture

29. The coffin stands in as well for Schrödinger’s famous box. In the “real” world, Nate must be either alive or dead, and the verdict is life: once again the NATHANIEL SAMUEL FISHER, JR. / 1965 – 2002 title appears, but the ‘2002’ fades away and we hear Nate’s voice at a barbeque talking about his surgery. If there has been a more extraordinary sequence in the history of television I have not seen it. Garcia and Ball’s collaboration here makes Cooper’s famous dream from Twin Peaks seem tame by comparison. How, then, did Heisenberg’s indeterminancy principle come to large and small screens near you? Why is the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat primed to experience perhaps more than nine lives in the movies and on television? I can only speak on behalf of television here. Survey of Popular Culture

30. In a time in which, according to Robert Thompson, the “quality TV aesthetic” has spread “like a virus” and we are witness to a “massive repackaging strategy across generic lines,” a “retooling comparable to the switchover to colour three decades earlier” (xvii), allusions to confounding controversies concerning the architecture of matter, from passing references (as in Castle) to integral roles in the narrative (Six Feet Under), are essential indications of quality control (if you will). When Big Bang Theory has a physicist on staff as a consultant, when we are told that Brian Greene’s book on string theory is essential reading for understanding the just-ended Lost (Porter, Lavery, and Robson 230), we must conclude that, while the fate of Schrödinger’s experimental feline may be uncertain, the idiot in the “idiot box” is conclusively dead. Survey of Popular Culture

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