We’ve all been left distraught and befuddled after a Bunker decision overturns a try we were certain was scored because we saw it scored with our own eyes. The Bunker demonstrates in the slowest of slow motions, from different angles and, just to rub it in, via several repeats, what embarrassingly unreliable witnesses we would be if called on in court to recount what we saw at the scene of a crime.
Closer to home, some of us, the males, will from time to time have demanded to know where the can opener is. It should be in the kitchen drawer and has now been moved because you can’t find it. Your wife then calmly and resignedly comes over, reaches in and pulls it out from exactly where you’ve been looking.
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She will attribute this phenomenon to you having had what she sarcastically and hurtfully calls, ‘a man look’. But you know that it most definitely was not there when you looked and it only appeared when it saw her coming. And while we are at it, where is the other sock gone?
It can’t just have disappeared from the face of the Earth and even she can’t find that one.
Cameron Munster speaks to referee Ashley Klein. (Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)
Which leads me to Schrodinger’s cat. Now I’m no quantum physicist, so I want to alert the many quantum physicists who read the rugby league pages of The Roar that I could well be out of my depth in trying to school Roar luminaries in the behaviour of subatomic particles.
However, since the Bunker will be part of my dissertation, I will push on.
Schrodinger suggested that according to quantum physics theory, if you put a cat in a box with a device that has a 50 per cent chance of releasing a poison and killing the cat and a 50 per cent chance of doing nothing, and close the lid, and wait a requisite time to allow for the 50 per cent chance of poisoning, the cat’s fate won’t actually be decided until an observer opens the box and looks. According to quantum physics, until you observe it, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time — in a strange, mixed state called “superposition.”
You see where I’m going? When the ref blows the whistle, and draws that square in the air, what he (or she) is actually drawing is Schrodinger’s box. It’s a signal to the Bunker that the box needs to be opened. The try meanwhile, like the cat, is in a state of superposition. It’s both been scored and not been scored, at the same time. And it follows that we are also in the box, in a state of superposition, both happy and outraged, until the Bunker takes a look and the probability wave collapses (look it up). Only then is the try scored or not scored.
It’s the same with the can opener. It’s not there until your wife looks for it. And, it follows, you’re not there either, until she looks.
Look at in this way, all unhappiness with the Bunker goes away. The Bunker isn’t making a decision based on video evidence to make you look silly, as you might think, because nothing has happened until it takes a look inside the box. You just think it has.
But no one cares what you think because you haven’t seen anything. You are not even there. You are in the box. With the cat. It’s the Bunker that makes things happen – by looking. And you can’t separate the outcome, what we call a decision, from the events that happen when the Bunker looks in the box. Just as you can’t separate the dancer from the dance, you can’t separate the play, the outcome, or for that matter, you.
Feeling confused? Don’t worry about it. The great Nobel laureate and quantum mathematician, Richard Feynman said, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics”. Profound. And mind you, the same could be said of the six-again rule.
I might also mention electromagnetic repulsion and the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Look them up if you need to. They will disabuse you of the fond assumption that a ball seemingly pressed to the grass had actually touched the ground as required for a try to be rewarded. It hasn’t. It never does. No matter how many angles, slow-mos, and replays, it never touches the ground. Trust me.
Best not to tell the Bunker though. It’s hard enough to get a try as it is.
