This week we have a fantastic new article by Kurt Engfehr, "Schrödinger's Documentary".
Illustration by Orah Lemer.
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"Life wants to be messy, our job is to tidy it up"
- Mark Twain
There is a scientific law that goes something like this: The act of observing an object changes the actions of the observed object even if that object is unaware that it is being observed.
Interestingly, this law has nothing to do with documentary filmmaking. And yet, it has everything to do with it. Originally, the law was formulated as a result of experiments in quantum physics. But, it could just as easily be applied to the aforementioned documentary filmmaking process because a basic tenent of making a documentary is observation, and the subjects of the film? Nothing more than human-sized petri dishes.
There’s a thought experiment that’s used to illustrate some of the complexity of the observation law. In a laboratory, a box sits on a table. Inside the box is a cat. However, due to bunch of factors that are just way too complicated to go into here, the cat may or may not be alive. The whole live cat/dead cat thing is determined by the actions of an observer lifting the lid to the box and looking into it. Until the observer looks into the box the cat exists in, for the cat, a very uncomfortable state, neither living nor dead. Zombie-like, if you will. But without the whole eating brains thing.
To some people, science-types I suppose you’d call them, the question of cat viability is the point of this experiment. Countless books, unknown numbers of studies, thousands of manhours have gone into solving this question, with only the vaguely unsatisfying answer of, “Could go either way” being the result.
