Rick and Morty and the best scientific joke on quantum I've heard in 20 years.

Rick and Morty has to be one of the greatest cartoons of all times. If you've been living in your bunker for the past few years and just emerged you may not have heard of it. That said it's incredibly creative.

The show is a riff off of Back to the Future.

But instead of Doc being just sorta out there he's now a bit on the psychopath side. Rick uses Morty as a human shield. While it's obvious he loves his grandson he's also not opposed to ripping him a new one and sharing his opinion of Morty's brain power.

The show dives into the concept of the multiverse. Rick isn't just Rick. He's Rick C-137. It's as if all the possible realities have been mapped out and they know exactly which one they are from. In the season 2 opener Rick, Morty, and Summer are ripped out of their dimension into a timeless vortex.

Here's the full episode- http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3atrno

Around the 4:45 mark he says "Those are Schrodinger's cats. Actually I assume they both are and are not just like us!" That line had me in tears.

Schrodinger's cat

This takes a leap into understanding our universe from a lens of quantum mechanics. Schrodinger was a Jewish German scientist that was working on understanding the nature of the atom during WWII trying to figure out how to capture the energy of an atom. One of his conclusions was that sub atomic particles can exist simultaneously as both waves and particles. They exist as both until you look at what it actually did, and then you can figure out if it worked as a wave or a particle.

To demonstrate this he came up with a pretty crazy WWII demented story about putting a cat in a box with acid on a timer. Then you shut the box. The timer doesn't have an actual set time it's determined to go, so if you want to know if the cat's alive or not you have to write an equation that includes both possibilities that he's alive or dead. You don't know the answer until you lift up the box.

Sorry to explain the joke

But it's an amazing piece of science and humor. You have to think about the world in time, then separate the world into multiverses, one of those multiverses has to include no time and be unstable for the situation to have drama, and then you have to make pretty sophisticated jokes about quantum mechanics. It's one thing to crack a joke about a cat, but it's another to understand it deeply enough to joke that they are simultaneously the cat in question and not. That's a very rich understand ing and part of why I love that show so much.

Steem on!