Is case you haven't heard, Liz and I are having a boy. We've known for a couple weeks now; just long enough for me to collect my thoughts and figure out how to word this blog post. It turns out that, like many things, the process of determining the sex of the baby can modeled using quantum mechanics. I'll spare you the mathematics, but i'll do my best to explain:
In quantum mechanics, we describe the state of a particle based on it's possibles states. Oddly, predictions regarding the behavior of the particle are made by assuming that all states are simultaneously present. So an electron is assumed to be half spin up and spin down and half spin down, even though it is impossible for an electron to be both at the same time.
Also, the act of measuring the quantum state of the particle is said to "compress" the quantum state; meaning you'd now know that the electron is spin down and this you can ignore the spin up portion of your compression. This is often misrepresented as "changing the result by measuring it."
I'm sure you can see where this is going. (Or perhaps not. It makes perfect sense to me, but that doesn't really mean it'll make sense to anyone else, now does it?) Before the sex of the baby was determined at the ultrasound appointment, we really had no idea whether it was a boy or a girl. In a sense our baby was both. We had boy names and girl names, pink baby clothes and blue baby clothes, and we'd both had dreams with the baby as a boy and as a girl. See? any predictions were being made with the assumption that our child was both male and female.
Then we had our ultrasound appointment and we compressed the quantum state of the little poppy seed. Now we know that our child is definitely a boy. All the girl portions of the baby's quantum state are no longer being considered, so our predictions have truly been changed by the act of measuring the baby's sex.
And you thought quantum mechanics had no use in your daily life, didn't you?...
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