Future Colors
Shaenon: And here’s the final version of the page from “Outside the Box” I’ve been sharing, with colors by the wonderful Liz Conley. Thank you so much, Liz!
This story will be in the next Couscous Collective anthology, FUTURE, set to come out around the end of the year.
Channing: It’s fascinating to me how much difference the work of a different colorist makes! I’ve grown used to Pancha Diaz’s excellent work on the daily strip, but it’s also great to see a different interpretation of Shaenon’s work.
Those three lines leading off to the next page seem ominous.
I assume one will involve an open box with a live cat, one will involve an open box with a dead cat, and one will involve a box that remains closed.
The third one involves either an open box with a cat simultaneously alive and dead, its quantum state uncollapsed despite observation, or a zombie cat reanimated in an unnatural mockery of life by twisted science, depending on whether it was Mom or Dad who did it.
Is the cat named Jimmy?
The problem I’ve always had with this thought experiment is that no one bothers to check the cat’s viewpoint. Wouldn’t the cat be the first observer (even to it’s own death) and therefore resolve the issue before the human observers?
I’d have thought so. And if you want to say “Ah, but the cat can only collapse the waveform from his in-box perspective, so outside it’s still unresolved” then why stop there? From the perspective of the scientist who stepped out to get a coffee while his colleague opened the box, the waveform doesn’t collapse until he returns to his lab? The waveform doesn’t collapse for laboratory management until they read the report?
(Actually, since Schrodinger’s point was “This doesn’t make sense and that’s a problem”, he’d probably say “Exactly!”)
So to the cat, either someone will open the box or someone won’t. Therefore the box is both open and closed…
Well, now you’re into the question of what “observation” means in quantum mechanics, which is a minefield I can’t even begin to understand. That said, I *think* the answer is “no”, because the cat is not making any decisions based on or, indeed, in any way aware of the quantum superposition, so it is not an observer.
But I’m definitely not even remotely close to understanding QM in any way, so who knows?
Huh, reading some more on Schroedinger’s Cat specifically, it would seem that part of its purpose was to highlight how poorly-defined the term “observer” is in QM, so the fact that the cat doesn’t count as an observer just helps reinforce the argument, since an unobserved Geiger counter *does* count as an observer.
This is an obvious example of technocratic-primate chauvanism.
Trying to decide whether it looks that way on purpose or it’s just my eyes or my monitor. No black lines?
Yeah, you’re right – it’s particularly obvious if you look at Artie, who’s wearing a black shirt with a brown outline.
I notice the branching line starts off the same brown – I wonder if the possible futures will have pink, green and blue outlines?
In the penciled version Artie’s line in panel 4 reads “resolve the paradox”, but in the inked and colored versions it reads “resolve paradox”. Was that supposed to happen? The latter sounds funny to me.
The way the brown outlines blend into Artie’s hair feels awkward to me, but I love the way they work with Rosalind’s palette.
Suppose the box contained a hat
’T’was emptied out to send the cat
The experiment remained the same
But a cat-in-the-hat box it became