Schrodinger’s girlfriend

I’m still trying to figure out the nature of this relationship. It’s much stronger than simple good platonic friendship, but doesn’t seem to be anywhere near a romantic relationship. Yesterday night, as I was putting myself to sleep, I was trying my best to somehow slot the relationship (It’s possible that nowadays she’s also thinking on similar lines). Had a tough time until I remembered Arul Murugan Lakshminarayanan.

This relationship is currently not in a single state. It is a superposition of states. It lies in the “good friend” state with a probability p and in the “romance” state with a probability 1 – p. So the relationship is in a mixture of the “good friend” and “romance” states. Now, don’t ask me the value of p. Frankly, I don’t know it. I just know that 0 < p < 1.

Now, sooner or later, somebody is bound to make a measurement. The somebody could be me or her or my parents or her parents or maybe some common friend or whoever. The measurement would be typically done by getting the two of us in one place and then asking us or something. And if she also thinks the relationship is in a quantum state (which is quite likely), the measurement itself would be non-trivial but assume that it has been achieved.

Here comes the crux – no later than the measurement is made, and communicated to us, the quantum state comes crashing down. Depending on what the two of us decide at the time of measurement, the relationship will collapse into one of the two states it is a mixture of – “good friend” or “romance”. It might also fall into a third state (something like “hate” or whatever), but the probability of this is infinitesimally small, so let us ignore that.

So we have a perfect “quantum situation” here. Something which lies in a superposition of states. And which can’t be measured without the collapse of these states! Arul may have given me a C in PH350 (Quantum Mechanics for Engineers), but I’m now convinced I deserved much better than that!