Schrödinger’s Brexit, ‘The Elements’ remix, physics referees and American football

By Hamish Johnston

On Tuesday I was rushing to finish writing a news story about quantum superposition and got a phone call out of the blue from Roger Sawyer, who is deputy editor on BBC Radio 4’s afternoon news and current affairs programme PM. He had the brilliant idea that the meme of “having your Brexit cake and eating it too” had some sort of connection to quantum superposition – and wanted some advice from Physics World.

It turns out that this was something that I had been musing over since the UK voted to leave the European Union. Ever since that fateful day in June, the country has been in a magical superposition of being in the EU and out of the EU at the same time – in other words Schrödinger’s Brexit, rather than Schrödinger’s cat. And like the designers of quantum computers, who work very hard to stop quantum information leaking out of their circuits, the political architects of Brexit are desperate to prevent the rest of us from taking a measure of their plans lest we collapse its wavefunction into an unsatisfactory trajectory.

Silly, I know, but it actually got me onto national radio. You can listen to the interview here, I come on at around minute 35. Even more amazing, is that the idea of Schrödinger’s Brexit inspired a column in the Economist. I suppose it’s nice to know that people have enough interest in physics to smile at a bad joke about quantum superposition.

Earlier this week we reported that four new elements have been given official names. Now comedian and self-described geek Helen Arney has updated Tom Lehrer’s classic song “The Elements”, which she performs in the above video.

In this post-truth world do we really need a physicist to explain why an American football referee’s call was wrong? Of course we do, and here is a great explanation from Wayne State University’s Bill Llope about why a call made during a University of Michigan-Ohio State game was wrong about the position of the ball. Part of Llope’s day job is building time-of-flight instrumentation – perfect training for an armchair quarterback!