Previously on “The Secret History of Vermont”

Introduction
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Chapter 5: Going Uphill in Both Directions

The tendency for non-horizontal surfaces to always slant upwards is a peculiarity of Vermont terrain that has been alluded to from time to time in this book. In Vermont when a grandfather tells a grandson, “Sonny, when I was your age I had to walk to school every day and it was uphill both ways.” the grandchild rolls his eyes, not because he’s being fed another line, but because Grampy is again belaboring the obvious.

How is this possible? The answer involves quantum mechanics, the properties of subatomic particles, potentially dead cats, and the Burlington Free Press. In the ivory tower world of academia there are currently only five people with the intellect required to comprehend the situation. Fortunately there are no ivory towers in Vermont so the rest of us should have no problem with it.

In quantum mechanic circles it is a rule of thumb that all possible states exist until the probability wave function is collapsed by an observer and one of the states gets cruelly singled out by the rest to join the other unhappy states that comprise reality. The classic demonstration of this is called “Schrodinger’s Cat” which is a thought experiment in which one puts a cat into a closed box along with a vial of poisonous gas and a mechanism that has a random 50-50 chance of breaking the vial in a certain time, say one hour. Do this and wait for an hour. What do you get?

The obvious answer is that you get a lawsuit from the S.P.C.A. In the ivory tower world of academia however what you get is a cat that is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. By opening the box and looking inside you “collapse the probability wave function” and get either a dead cat and a lungful of poisonous gas, or a compact mass of muscles, teeth, and claws trying to impress upon you its opinion on being locked up in a box for an hour.

The point being that the cat is neither dead nor alive before you open the lid and observe what’s inside. The cat is in a weird state of being both at the same time.

A critical factor of the experiment is the random mechanism that may or may not break the vial of poisonous gas. For the experiment to work right in the quantum mechanical sense the random mechanism has to be really random. The classic random mechanism uses a radioactive atom as a trigger. If the radioactive atom decays within its half-life then the cat dies too, otherwise the cat lives on and can be reused in the next experiment.

Weird quantum mechanical effects, like both sides of an either-or situation being true at the same time, are generally only observed at the atomic and subatomic level because they require random events that usually only exist at the atomic and subatomic level. In Vermont however there is a macroscopic random process of such a large magnitude that quantum effects become a fact of everyday life. That process is the Burlington Free Press weather forecast.

Every day the Burlington Free Press prints a weather forecast. Every day thousands of people in Vermont buy the Burlington Free Press and read the weather forecast. Every day the weather forecast in the Burlington Free Press has absolutely no correlation to the weather that day. The number of people who daily observe the completely random process of the Burlington Free Press weather forecast vis-a-vis the actual weather creates an incredible quantum mechanical stress that is discharged into the ground like lightning. As a result the ground in Vermont has some surprising properties.

Obviously not all locales in Vermont have the “uphill both ways” property otherwise Vermont ski resorts would have a much more difficult advertising job to do. Quantum mechanics (the people, not the theory) guess that this is because there are enough foreign skiers who don’t read the Burlington Free Press to dilute the effect. Otherwise it is readily observed that, “On average, any given route in Vermont goes uphill.” This is because when one sets out to go somewhere in Vermont all possible route-states exist at the same time. When one decides where to go and how to get there the probability wave function collapses and the second most improbable route-state is chosen: A route-state that goes uphill even if one went uphill to get where one happens to be and is now going back.

It is the second law of thermodynamics, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” that prevents routes from going downhill in both directions.

There are other effects of the quantum imbalance in Vermont. One is that despite the fact there are a finite number of miles of interstate highway in Vermont, repaving the interstate highway is an infinitely long process. Another is that regardless how low the min-max thermometer at the author’s cabin indicates, the next day at breakfast there’s someone at the Town Restaurant who claims that it was colder at his or her house that night.