Turning Cheese into Steak

You know how you hear or read about various amusing incidents about people like Richard Feynman or other famous scientists that become an integral part of their legendary status? Some of these incidents arise from things they do on purpose, and others arise completely by accident. I've occasionally done things that could potential be construed to be in both of these categories, though I unfortunately (fortunately?) don't have the scientific reputation for them to propagate that far. (That said, one of my practical jokes did get brought up by a faculty member during my University of Maryland interview in 2006... The scientific world is a rather small one...) Also, I think it's often true that the unintentional incidents are often the ones that make the best stories. Sometimes you just need the right mix of personality and circumstance for magic to happen, and that brings me to Wednesday night. But first, a long precursor is in order:


Back in the day (late February 2006), we had a discussion on Arcane Gazebo's blog about the notion of entanglement and food perhaps being in a superposition of a salad and a steak. The particular blog entry that I have in mind included a link to this particular post on Cosmic Variance.

This is a rather long aside, but let me quote the relevant passage from Cosmic Variance:

Fortunately, we are not only very considerate, we are also excellent experimental physicists with a keen grasp of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics, according to the conventional interpretations that are good enough for our purposes here, says three crucial and amazing things.

First, objects can exist in “superpositions” of the characteristics we can measure about them. For example, if we have an item of food, according to old-fashioned classical mechanics it could perhaps be “salad” or “steak.” But according to quantum mechanics, the true state of the food could be a combination, known as a wavefunction, which takes the form (food) = a(salad) + b(steak), where a and b are some numerical coefficients. That is not to say (as you might get the impression) that we are not sure whether the food is salad or steak; rather, it really is a simultaneous superposition of both possibilities.

The second amazing thing is that we can never observe the food to be in such a superposition; whenever we (or sleeping puppies) observe the food, we always find that it appears to be either salad or steak. (Eigenstates of the food operator, for you experts.) The numerical coefficients a and b tell us the probability of measuring either alternative; the chance we will observe salad is a2, while the chance we will observe steak is b2. (Obviously, then, we must have a2 + b2 = 1, since the total probability must add up to one [at least, in a world in which the only kinds of food are salad and steak, which we are assuming for simplicity].)

Third and finally, the act of observing the food changes its state once and for all, to be purely whatever we have observed it to be. If we look and it’s salad, the state of the food item is henceforth (food) = (salad), while if we saw that it was steak we would have (food) = (steak). That’s the “collapse of the wavefunction.”


Now let's revisit Wednesday night, which was the special dinner at a really fancy restaurant for a workshop that CABDyN (Oxford's complex systems group) was hosting. Because of emergency grant proposals, other things that cropped up last week, and the need to spend at least one day (Friday) revising a draft of a paper before the term officially started, I was unable to go to the workshop as well. I was asked to go to the dinner anyway (even though I felt guilty), so I went---although I was in quite a lousy and antisocial mood that night. Some of the attendees didn't seem to like the fact that I was at the conference dinner even though I wasn't going to the rest of the workshop (and, as I mentioned, I did feel somewhat guilty about it), but that's not the story I want to tell.

The main course was some cheese thing-- a cheese souffle, I think. I don't like cheese. I will typically entirely avoid food that has any cheese on it (except for cream cheese, which has a rather misleading name anyway--it's not the same thing) and when there is some, I will scrape it off as best as I can before I eat the rest of the food. Some people reading this have seen me in action with a slice of cheese inadvertently ends up on a hamburger, etc. I had already declined the previous course because it didn't look appealing, and as those who know me even moderately well are aware, I am a very picky eater and simply won't eat something that looks completely unappealing to me (or that has things in it I don't like, etc.). OK, so then the main course comes and it turns out to be the cheese souffle; we're all supposed to eat vegetarian or something. I found out what was inside the object and--knowing that I wasn't going to eat it at all--I asked a waiter to take it back because I didn't want to waste it.

When the waiter came back, without my asking he told me about a couple of items that could be made on short notice. He then brought back a menu (well, he told me first without the menu, but I asked to take a look at the menu anyway) and pointed out those items again. Note that I did NOT ask any of the waiters to do this... I was just planning on getting food on my own later, but given the offer and because one of the items that could be made was a steak, I went for it. They said they would just charge it to the account being used to pay the bill, so I memorized the price so that I could e-mail the dinner's organizer when I got home to offer to pay for my food because I simply wouldn't have been comfortable not doing that. (The organizers refused to accept my money.) But anyway, I had a really good steak (the best I've had in the UK, actually) while everybody else (maybe 60 or so people) had to eat vegetarian--and it was purely by accident. In short, I figured out how to turn cheese into steak (but without the entanglement).

A couple of the people at my table seemed kind of annoyed at this, and the whole thing was apparently a hot topic at the workshop the next day.

I think it's safe to say that I have added to my legendary status. As I mentioned, all it takes is a combination of personality and circumstance. One doesn't need to actually try to do anything. As Lemming mentioned by IM, "You're going to have a beautiful eulogy."