How people are like quantum particles
Have you ever noticed that people tend to act like quantum particles? One day as I was in the physics computer lab at school I had a conversation on this very subject. These were some of our observations:
- Girls are bosons. For example, say there are three girls on a couch. The middle girl gets up. What happens? One girl on the end moves to the middle to be next to the other girl, which is a lower energy state. This is also why girls go to the bathroom in groups.
- Guys are fermions. For example, say there are three guys on a couch. The end guy gets up. What happens? The middle guy moves to the end because guys have antisymmetric wave functions (as do fermions) and can't stand to be in the same state as another guy (on the same end of the couch).
- Here's an example of good ol' Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle at work:
A girl is in a superposition of liking a guy and not liking a guy. She cannot observe herself and collapse her own wave function. The guy collapses her wave function into one state, say, liking him. After he leaves, by the Uncertainty Principle, her wave function de-localizes, and she cannot decide whether she likes him. Later, her girlfriend recollapses her wave function into the opposite state, not liking the guy, and he can't figure out what happened.
- A particle in an infinite square well can be modeled by a kid in a small room.
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