Cordial Deconstruction

(Not Polite or Respectful, just Cordial.)

Archive for the ‘Flash Forward’ Category

Prop (In)Convenience Theater Review: Flash Forward, “The Gift”

Posted by cordialdeconstruction on November 5, 2009

In Tonight’s Episode of Flash Forward, “The Gift”, three undercover FBI agents are attempting to gain entry to a meeting of the underground Blue Hand club.  In an entry room outside the main area, an elderly man meets them and puts a revolver on the table and asks them, “Who’s gonna play?”  To clarify what he’s asking, the man picks up the revolver, puts the barrel under his chin and pulls the trigger (no gunshot), puts the gun back on the table, and repeats his question, indicating one of the undercover FBI agents must do the same and play Russian roulette for them to gain entry.

Agent Al Gough immediately picks up the revolver, puts the barrel under his chin and pulls the trigger as well, also surviving, and puts the gun back on the table.  Agent Demetri Noh then says, “I get it, no bullets, good gag.” Believing the gun must not have been loaded.  The old man opens the cylinder and ejects a single round of ammunition with a semi-jacket hollow point bullet, hands it to agent Gough and says, “Your ticket in;  Welcome to the Blue Hand, gentlemen.” And walks out of the room.

Agent Gough was willing to play Russian Roulette without re-spinning the cylinder (meaning he had a 1 in 5 chance of pulling the trigger on a loaded chamber) because he was alive in his flash forward, and therefore knew he would not die in the present.

The problem is that the round clearly had a primer strike on it, meaning it was either a dud, or an intentionally inert round, though I assume we weren’t supposed to notice that.

To clarify for those less familiar with firearms, this means that the primer had already been struck by the firing pin.  Either the round was dud that should have gone off but didn’t because the primer was defective, or the round was intentionally loaded with an already detonated primer to make it inert.

If we give the prop master the benefit of the doubt and  assume the prop was supposed to have a primer strike, it would actually raise an interesting question as to whether that was a dud or a intentionally inert round.  If it was an intentionally inert round, then the Blue Hand club likely just wants to see if you’re willing to pull the trigger, but doesn’t want to actually kill you.  If the round was a dud, it would raise the possibility that the future is fixed and whatever you try to do to change it will always fail, no matter what, but something that happens at the end of the show pretty much nixes that idea.

Posted in Flash Forward, Prop Convenience Theater, Television | Leave a Comment »

Flash Forward Gets Schrödinger’s Cat a Little Wrong

Posted by cordialdeconstruction on October 29, 2009

Tonight’s episode of Flash Forward, “Scary Monsters and Super Creeps” contained a flawed portrayal of the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment (note the 2 separate links) in a conversation where a quantum physicist is trying to pick up a hot woman on a train by telling her he can explain what caused the flash forward.  After mentioning that the most basic concept she needed to understand was quantum superpositions, they have some witty flirting and then the conversation proceeds as follows:

Physicist:  “Imagine you have a cat, a teeny tiny cat that fits in the palm of your hand.  You also have a poisonous sardine.  Once we close your palm there are two possible scenarios: either the cat eats the sardine and dies or the cat doesn’t eat the sardine and lives.  Quantum physics says until we open your hand to discover the cat’s fate, both eventualities occur at the same time.  For us, the cat is both living and deceased.”

Hot Woman  “But how can that be?”

Physicist:  “That’s the miracle of quantum mechanics.  The observer get to decide.”

The problem is that this thought experiment leaves out an important element of the original, a quantum probability.  In the original experiment, the cat’s life or death is dependent not on a poisoned sardine, but on the potential decay of a radioactive isotope source.  If the source decays and emits a decay particle, a hammer triggered by a Geiger counter breaks a vial of poison, killing the cat; otherwise the cat lives.  The key is that the decay or non-decay of the isotope is a quantum probability, whereas the cat eating a poisoned sardine is not.

Schrödinger originated this thought experiment in an attempt to illustrate what he saw as a flaw in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.  According to quantum mechanics, the cat is both alive and dead (because the isotope has both decayed and not decayed) until the observer collapses the quantum wave function by observing the state of the cat (which is dependent on the state of the isotope), even though common sense says the cat was obviously either dead or alive before being observed.  The experiment also has nothing to do with the observer “deciding” anything.  The act of observation collapses the quantum wave function to one state or the other, but no choice of states is involved or possible.

The Flash Forward thought experiment was an not an example of quantum superposition since no quantum state was involved, and it wasn’t Schrödinger’s/Schroedinger’s Cat.

Posted in Flash Forward, Science, Television | 3 Comments »