An Imprecisely Measured Screw

“Look, say you tell me you got a 90% chance of getting laid tonight. And then I tell you, nah, it’s only 50% chance — either you will, or you won’t. Two options. And then you end up getting laid after all. Which one of us was right?”

Pat doesn’t answer. He’s trying not to bite through his tongue as his fingers scramble around the slippery screw nut absorbing his focus.

“You might say you were more right than I was. The fuck does that mean.” Skinner loves to mouth off. He’s looming over Pat like an oak tree, leaning against the chassis Pat’s working on. “It’s backwards, right? A single result doesn’t validate any kind of percentage.”

Pat takes a break. His fingers sting from pressing against cold metal. “You could say I was less surprised than you.”

Skinner grins. Thermos cup in his hand is empty, but he mimes taking a sip anyway. “Surprised nothing. Anyway, let’s say multiple universe theory is true. Then there’s got to be infinite worlds where you got laid and infinite worlds where you didn’t. Proportional when finite, sure, but both aleph-null.”

“Alright. Well suppose multiple universe theory isn’t true, then,” says Pat.

“That’s just the problem!” Skinner adjust his weight against the chassis, causing Pat to curse. “Because if we just have the one timeline then there’s no multiple events,” Skinner continues, “you only get laid or don’t get laid tonight once, and we can’t validate any statistical claims about the probability thereof. And what is science without validation?”

“Call it a Bayesian prior, then.” Pat wipes his greasy hand against his pant leg, and goes back to the nut. He’s sure he can get it loose without going for the rachet, he got it on there by hand. “It’s just a number. It represents a level of certainty, but it doesn’t have to.”

Skinner rolls backward in mock surprise. “Well well well, Professor Pat, tell me more! Have you been building frames with arbitrary measurements again? No wonder we keep getting so many recalls.”

The fastener slides a quarter turn before Pat’s fingers slip this time, and he shifts his weight to push it again. “How do you know what a millimeter is, Skinner?”

Skinner pretends to think. “I guess Her Royal Highness must have told me at some point or other. She heads that department, if I recall.”

“Yeah,” says Pat, “somebody made it up. We picked a length. Same for seconds, angles, all of it. Some of it makes more sense, some of it less, but it’s all measures and numbers we picked to describe the world around us, after the fact. The same for probabilities — doubly so. Numbers behave well in the realm of math, but that has nothing to do with the real world. So we project things into the math world: so long for 1 second, so long for 1000 mills. Then we do a bunch of math to the numbers, and at the end project them back out into the real world. It mostly works well enough for our purposes, but if there’s ever a mistake it’s in the projection, not the math.”

Skinner has to think for real. “Sure, so you’re saying the percentage chance of you getting laid is an abstraction. You’re factoring in all the unknowns, the things that could go one way or the other, and you’re making a guess meant to represent your uncertainty.”

Pat gets the nut spinning. “Sure, you could say that.”

“I will say that. I think you fucked up, Pat.”

Pat takes a closer look at the chassis. “I dunno, threads look fine to me.”

“Huh? No, I don’t mean the metal,” says Skinner, “I mean the math. You picked the wrong model. You got a multivariable where you should have a superposition.”

Pat thinks this over. “You’re back to the multiple worlds theory again.”

“Virtual worlds this time, they can’t hurt you.” Skinner sees the floor boss coming, and quickly hunkers down next to Pat. “In my expert opinion, you’re gonna need to pop out that cross beam, replace the screw, redo the welds and start over. Try to use a European nut this time instead of American. And understand that unique future events are better modeled as superpositions until observed, i.e. experienced, and thereby collapsed. It has all the advantages of a probability function, being non-deterministic, that is, while retaining none of the disadvantages, being a statement about a distribution of samples and not a single event, that is.”

“A single event drawn from a random variable.”

“A random variable you have hypothesized to make calculations more convenient for your purposes.” Skinner stands up and stretches — the floor boss has cruised past to his office without giving the men a second glance. “You said it yourself, the semantics of the numbers here are just a projection from the real world to the math world. You chose to project the existence of a random variable, but you didn’t have to. You could pick something else.”

“Wave collapse is probabilistic,” Pat says.

Skinner shakes his head. “Wave collapse is probabilistic from the perspective of the observer. As far as we know, physically, wave collapse doesn’t happen at all.”

Pat thinks. “What do I gain from this alternate model?”

“An alternate set of tools,” Skinner says. “Rather than setting expectations and being surprised, you anticipate multiple events at once and none of them surprise you. You can control the wave collapse in stages, easily combine it with other quantae. Most of all, it keeps the focus on what really matters, which is your incomplete measurements of the real world. Percentages are too brainy. You give yourself a lot of credit thinking you can have a Bayesian prior as to whether you’re getting any. Stick to what you don’t know, that’s what I say. That’s what I like about quantum mechanics.”

Pat shrugs. “Yeah, okay, sure. Help me find that European twist?”

Skinner throws his hands up. “No can do, cowboy, I gotta get to work. I’m a busy man.” He spins on his heel and struts off whistling, empty thermos tin still in his hand.