A lemon seed in my coke. Quantum joke?

I was enjoying my birthday dinner, drinking my coke and all of a sudden a lemon seed came up my straw!

I did not have any lemon in my coke so my mind (filled mostly with fluff, insanity, and occasional random science dust) wandered to properties of quantum physics...

In our everyday world, lemon seeds don't jump from place to place... but in the quantum world, things do. Like in an atom... particles are either in one orbit or another - never in between.



Particles exist in either one place or another... and can instantly get there. Is this what happened to make a lemon seed appear in my glass?

Or could this be an example of superposition??? 4:30:


Or could it be quantum tunneling... if you shoot particles at a wall they sometimes go through the wall because they are in more than one location at once:

Let's say you are throwing a rubber ball against a wall. You know you don't have enough energy to throw it through the wall, so you always expect it to bounce back. Quantum mechanics, however, says that there is a small probability that the ball could go right through the wall (without damaging the wall) and continue its flight on the other side! With something as large as a rubber ball, though, that probability is so small that you could throw the ball for billions of years and never see it go through the wall. But with something as tiny as an electron, tunneling is an everyday occurrence.

link
another link in case you still dont' believe

They have even photographed it! 6:27


And that doesn't even take into account the multiple universe theory, and various theories how things just pop between them... some think this explains ghosts and other paranormal experiences....

I know my mind works funny but I often wonder if there aren't ghost hunters in two universes at relatively the same location in each universe hunting each other...


So was this some multi-demensional gaff, or a some sort of weird quantum fluctuation???

(just made that one up, not science-it-y at all)

Most likely... it just fell there in the back when they were making my coke... or even worse, they didn't clean the glass well and i now was sucking on another persons lemon

photo credit

Cheers,
~piano

Maybe the metal from the coke can that was recycled had a lemon seed stuck to it that somehow survived the recycling process? Maybe lemons are used in the manufacture process of cola.. who knows. Sometimes the best explanation is the simplest.

Sounds like you choose the most unfortunate time to collapse your soda wave function and ended up in the eigenstate where you got the lemon pip without the lemon.

Or of course if you go with the multi world theory then some other guy got your lemon and you got his pip and theres some unhappy guy somewhere in a different universe with a glass full of pips and no soda at all, and yet another one who looked down at his glass and found he was holding a lion.....

You dodged a bullet there to be honest.

Sounds like your classic case of DGS. (Dirty Glass Syndrome)

Originally posted by davespanners
Sounds like you choose the most unfortunate time to collapse your soda wave function and ended up in the eigenstate where you got the lemon pip without the lemon.

Or of course if you go with the multi world theory then some other guy got your lemon and you got his pip and theres some unhappy guy somewhere in a different universe with a glass full of pips and no soda at all, and yet another one who looked down at his glass and found he was holding a lion.....

You dodged a bullet there to be honest.

Maybe I dodged several... at least it was only a lemon seed in stead of something else....

Originally posted by AllUrChips
Sounds like your classic case of DGS. (Dirty Glass Syndrome)

he just thought it was a 'lemon seed'

reply to post by pianopraze


Well, no one else has said it, so I think its only right.

Happy Birthday!

Now...about that lemon seed.....

A lemon seed is far too large to simply "jump" as a bucky ball may "appear" to do.

Originally posted by burntheships
reply to post by pianopraze

 

Well, no one else has said it, so I think its only right.

Happy Birthday!

Now...about that lemon seed.....

Well thank you

I am glad it really WAS a lemon seed...

... and that it popped into my coke instead of other places...

"what the bleep do we know" takes quantum physics and turns it into new age crap. there are a few parts that are accurate, but then they are swiftly twisted.

there were probably lemons in the pitcher. quantum mechanics isn't complete, and i find it hard to believe that a deterministic universe is based off of unknowable interactions.

Originally posted by Bob Sholtz
"what the bleep do we know" takes quantum physics and turns it into new age crap. there are a few parts that are accurate, but then they are swiftly twisted.

there were probably lemons in the pitcher. quantum mechanics isn't complete, and i find it hard to believe that a deterministic universe is based off of unknowable interactions.

Well hopefully I got the lemons, i mean science out of it... not the crap...

... otherwise what would that make my lemonade I'm trying to make here since the universe spontaneously gave me lemon for my birthday???

Originally posted by DarkSarcasm
A lemon seed is far too large to simply "jump" as a bucky ball may "appear" to do.

shhh...

don't tell that to my quantum lemon seed...

... who knows where it would tunnel to then?

OP, have you considered the lemon seed could have time-slipped?

Maybe it was inside a lemon, thinking Australia was upside down, and then appeared in your Coke... that or a gift from the Titorman Himself!

Why not?

reply to post by pianopraze


Well, did you keep it?
You know, the seed!



Do you still have it?

If we consider the accidental lemon seed scenario: Could have been someone squeezing a lemon into another glass close by, someone throwing lemon seeds for fun, shooting lemon seeds from their mouth with a large straw.

As already pointed out, particles do quantum jumps, not whole objects.

It would be a crazy coincidence if every particle in a lemon seed simultaneously jumped together to the same can of cola. I guess given a big enough universe and a long enough timeframe, its technically possible.

Then again, maybe not every particle in your lemon seed is really from a lemon seed. Maybe there are some particles mixed in there from, say, an elephant spleen, or chips of paint, or the heart of a star 5 trillion miles away...

Originally posted by NowanKenubi
OP, have you considered the lemon seed could have time-slipped?

Maybe it was inside a lemon, thinking Australia was upside down, and then appeared in your Coke... that or a gift from the Titorman Himself!

Why not?

That's a great theory too... maybe its my lemon seed from my future lemonade I'm going to make from the tree I plant with this lemon seed...

... hope it doesn't make some time paradox or something...

... maybe the seed came back to meet its great grand daddy seed....

Originally posted by burntheships
reply to post by pianopraze

 

Well, did you keep it?
You know, the seed!

Do you still have it?

Absolutely!

It's right....

... doh!

Darn quantum-timetraveling seeds...

Originally posted by pianopraze

... hope it doesn't make some time paradox or something...

... maybe the seed came back to meet its great grand daddy seed....

If it is named Philip J. Fry, it may be paradoxing itself...

Originally posted by Leftist
As already pointed out, particles do quantum jumps, not whole objects.

It would be a crazy coincidence if every particle in a lemon seed simultaneously jumped together to the same can of cola. I guess given a big enough universe and a long enough timeframe, its technically possible.

Then again, maybe not every particle in your lemon seed is really from a lemon seed. Maybe there are some particles mixed in there from, say, an elephant spleen, or chips of paint, or the heart of a star 5 trillion miles away...

edit on 3/29/2012 by Leftist because: (no reason given)

Num num... was pretty tasty for a space-going elephant chip lemon...

But if there are infinite universes that would mean that it was bound to happen sooner or later...