When Schrödinger meets Nolan...

Disclaimer:

The following article is an original piece of the author’s imagination and has no scientific relevance.This article would be of interest to those readers who have seen the movie Inception. (For those who haven’t seen this masterpiece; May the Lord forgive you for this crime! You can still make amends by reading the synopsis on IMDB. But it’s a compulsory pre-requisite)

The readers have every right to question the timing of this article. Inception is no longer the “gossip talk” in friend circles. The hype has been neutralised; Mr Nolan’s art has been got all the kudos it deserved and the viewers have had their every single penny worth it!

Long and heated discussions and arguments outside the movie theatre was a natural scene at many places. It happened with me as well. Doubts over the authenticity, rationality and the out of the world plot! Some of my friends even termed it as ‘absurd’ (The actual word used wasn’t absurd, but for the dignified English men it means something close to absurd ;) )

But there was something in this absurdity; every genuine idea which one cannot understand feels absurd. And then I set to out with the whole Inception Investigation.

 So what exactly must have inspired Mr. Christopher Noran? And my search ended (or may be it is just the beginning!) with QUANTUM MECHANICS.

Recall: Pauli’s Exclusion Principle

• It states that no two electrons can have the same all four quantum numbers. More generally no two fermions (particles with half-integer spins) may occupy same Quantum States simultaneously.
• In contrast, integer spin particles, bosons are not subject to the Pauli’s exclusion principle. For bosons, any number of identical particles can occupy the same quantum state.

Note: Quantum numbers in laymen terms can be defined as the address of the particle.

So how many of you can already smell inception in Pauli’s theory? The people living the dream are simultaneously occupying more than one Quantum state. This means that a person can be at as many different levels as possible at the same instant of time. Either this is a direct violation of Pauli’s principle or may be Mr. Noran has assumed the characters and projections in the dreams to have Boson like characteristics!

Assume the characters are in a particular stage of the Dream and let then have the Quantum numbers Q₁.

Where Q_i = ( n_i, l_i, m_i, s_i )

n =principal quantum number

l  =azimuthal quantum number

m=magnetic quantum number

s  = spin number

Then according to the movie they go to a higher stage in some other mental state which has some other Quantum state; say Q₂. But there is an every possibility of a Q₃ or even a Q₀.

So according to Pauli only one of these quantum state is the right state, as it is physically impossible for a particle to occupy two different positions at one time!

Now the onus is upto the individual in the dream to identify which is the actual quantum state he/she is occupying. Here it is of extreme importance to understand what happened with ‘Mal’, wife of Cobb in the movie. She fell in love with a entirely different quantum state far away from reality. And she could not decide what is real and what is a dream. If only Mal had heard about the “Schrödinger’s Cat”!

Recall: Schrödinger’s Cat

For the better part of the last century, the most accepted explanation for why the same quantum particle may behave in different ways was the Copenhagen interpretation. It was first posed by physicist Niels Bohr in 1920. It says that a quantum particle doesn't exist in one state or another, but in all of its possible states at once! (gotcha Mr. Nolan! So that’s where you got the damn idea..) It's only when we observe its state that a quantum particle is essentially forced to choose one probability, and that's the state that we observe.

In Quantum mechanical terms this state of occupying different quantum states is called ‘coherent superposition’. This Copenhagen interpretation was proved wrong by Ervin Schrödinger.

In his theoretical experiment, ­Schrödinger put his cat in a box, along with a bit of radioactive material and a Geiger counter- a device for detecting radiation. The Geiger counter was designed so that when it sensed the decay of the radioactive material, it triggered a hammer which was poised to break a flask containing hydrocyanic acid, which, when released, would kill the cat. During its stay there, the cat came to exist in an unknowable state.

The only way to find out whether the cat is alive or dead is to open the door! Schrodinger’s cat in Inception is nothing but the ‘Totem’!

All that Mal had to do was to spin the totem, open the door and life would be as smooth as silk!  The totem remained locked and thus the Copenhagen interpretation stays!

Hats off to the director’s creativity with physics. All that I have investigated is the Quantum aspect of inception. I have completely ignored the preposterous space-time logic behind the movie. That’s for general relativity to take care. Time slowing down, zero gravity whacky stunts is not in the scope of this blog. May be a sequel is to follow, but that depends on the viewer response.

There may be people out there who may find this blog as absurd as my good friend found Inception! Whatever may be the opinion but comments are always welcome. 

NOTE: Some physicist may argue that Quantum mechanics is applicable only to microscopic particles and not to the projections in the dreams which are hugely macroscopic (I agree that Ellen Page is a bit short but that doesn’t make her microscopic!:P). Even if you consider the smallest elementary particle of each projection and apply the quantum theory than it would suffice! And if the arguments are withheld for every particle than obviously quantum theory can be generalised to macroscopic characters in Inception!

And the page gets a break…