List of physics references

This article is in need of an update.

Editors are encouraged to update and expand the article.

This article attempts to list references to specific and common physics-related issues.

Season 2

A club is seen, called Schrödinger's Kit-Kat Club. This is a reference to the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, an important quantum mechanics idea by physicist Erwin Schrödinger. In the thought experiment, a cat is placed in a box alongside a bottle of poisonous gas which will open at a random time. After a certain time, there is 50 % chance that the bottle will have opened and that the cat would be dead. According to the widely accepted Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the cat would at this time be both dead and alive simultaneously.

In the horse race, the judges' decide the winner by measuring the cameras on a quantum level, and the Professor claims that they "changed the outcome by measuring it". This is a reference to Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, published in 1927, which states that a quantum level object is changed whenever measured, due to the photons of light falling upon it and reacting with it.

The episode references much of known cosmology in realistically depicting how our solar system and ultimately the universe will end, as well as how the Big Bang happened, and the universe - the Earth and the moon included - formed.

In another reference to the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, Erwin Schrödinger is chased and captured by NNYPD officers Fry and URL, who find a cat, a cesium atom, and some poison in a box in his car. The box also contained drugs.

This article or section is a stub. You can help by expanding it.