I for one welcome our new Squirrel Overlords

Discover how the Squirrel Wavelength photograph reveals squirrels may have disproven quantum mechanics with their clever physics!

Written byPhil Plait
| 1 min read
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Credit: Vaclav Matous/Shutterstock

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Squirrels. I can see the raw intelligence in their eyes when they torment my dog, Canis Minor, staying just out of reach. Or when they calculate trajectories and ballistics, jumping from tree to tree, going through trigonometric geometries in their heads, perhaps even solving n-dimensional manifolds almost literally on the fly. My proof?

See that? See it? Today was colder than the time I took the Squirrel Wavelength photograph. That means lower energy, and the squirrels, with lower energy, can't jump as far. The Squirrel Wavelength is shorter. But in quantum mechanics, lower energy means longer wavelengths.

The conclusion is obvious: squirrels have disproven quantum mechanics. All our technology is based on QM: digital cameras, store scanners, even the machines that make M&Ms. We're toast. What's next? Gravity? String theory? Is there no limit to what these rodents can do? Today, my fence. Tomorrow, the LHC.

One of them, Sciurus sapiens, mentally disassembling the Theory of Relativity.

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