Schrodinger's movie projector

I’m having another one of my patented “go to a hotel and watch a marathon of movies projected on the wall” weekends this weekend, to celebrate my 46^th birthday. (If you think there's a better way for a 46-year-old man to spend his time and money, well, keep it to yourself.)

At least I think I am. See, I haven’t actually tested the projector yet.

It is, therefore, kind of like Schrodinger’s movie projector. Until I test it, I won’t have any idea whether that projector is alive or dead.

If you want a full explanation of Schrodinger’s Cat, the thought experiment devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger, you can go here. In simple terms, though, it involves a cat in a box who may or may not have died as a result of the fact that a radioactive substance may or may not have decayed enough to poison the cat. Until you open the box, you don’t know whether the cat is alive or dead, so in theoretical terms, the cat is both alive and dead simultaneously.

My projector is like that.

But I can’t quite bring myself to look in the box. And without the projector, I might cancel the hotel stay. And if I don’t do that at least 48 hours before check-in time, I will be charged for the first night.

But I can’t quite bring myself to learn that the projector is dead. I’d rather exist in Schrodinger’s state of not knowing for as long as possible. For me, for now, the projector is both alive and dead.

If you’re wondering why I should suspect that my projector might be dead, well, I’ve been down this road before. I was going away for one of these weekends back in 2015, just one night that time, and didn’t discover until the morning I was ready to leave that the projector just wouldn’t power on. It was a cheap projector, purchased by my wife online from a Chinese company, and it did in fact work quite well for a number of months. But then it just gave up the ghost. Whether it was inferior electronics or poor storage practices that causes its untimely demise, I don’t know. As it had one of those cases that is basically impossible to open, I never made any inroads to figuring it out, nor learned whether it was within my capabilities to fix it. It just didn’t work, and since it was too late to cancel, I just went to the hotel anyway and watched movies on my laptop on the bed.

Flash forward two years, and I scheduled another one of these weekends for my birthday in 2017. And so I went about acquiring a projector, this time using Gumtree, which is the local equivalent of Craigslist. I paid a similarly cheap price for it (about $80) and met a very nice guy outside of Flinders Street train station to transact the deal. Only when I got home did I discover that it was a North American projector, meaning it was not compatible with the local power outlets. However, the guy said that if I just used an adapter, it should work fine. And it did.

But as it turns out, I don’t have very regular uses for a cheap projector that’s better suited for projecting movies on the walls of hotel rooms than for any kind of home entertainment use. It’s been two years and I have yet to use it again. If I get another use out of it, at least that’ll lower its effective cost from a one-time $80/per rental to a two-time $40/per rental.

But will I? A lot can happen to a dormant piece of electronic equipment in two years, even stored inside its original box on a dry shelf rather than in some dark and dank corner.

It would be easy enough to test it, and I will. Sometime before Wednesday afternoon, anyway.

But even if it’s a better brand than the original projector we had – and there’s no guaranteeing it is – it has that extra complicating factor of requiring the adapter to work in Australia. This may make me resemble an old person more than I’d like to admit, but I have a mild paranoia that any piece of equipment designed to work in one country might blow itself out with another country’s currents running through it. I’ve got a mild paranoia that I myself might cause the radioactive atom to decay, prompting the glass to shatter and the poison to fill the box, just by testing it to see if it works.

Which gives this something in common with another physics principle other than Schrodinger’s Cat: the Observer Effect, which states that an observer will have a measurable effect on a scientific phenomenon just through the act of observing it.

So I want to live in that dream of the projector not being broken just a little bit longer. If only because if it is broken, I will then have to admit to myself that I might cancel this weekend away, and therefore admit to my wife that I only care about going away for a weekend to myself if I have a projector that will project movies on the wall.

I don’t know which scientific principle states that if you observe your own obsessiveness too closely, it makes it real.