— Of Physics & Woodpeckers —

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Already mentioned this on a FB page so we’ll revisit it here as well…

Over the years some folks have called the Ivory-bill “Schrodinger’s Woodpecker” after “Schrodinger’s Cat” (famous physics thought experiment in which a cat is simultaneously alive and dead until an observer comes along to view it and cause those two probability waves to collapse into one of the binary options).

It’s sort of a fun analogy but I was never really fond of it. Instead, with a lot of physics talk at the time swirling around a hypothetical particle, the Higgs boson, I thought that made a better analogy — a particle for which there was much evidence, and they were simply trying to lock it down. At the time, in mid-2011, I wrote

“Schrodinger's cat is mostly an abstract thought exercise... I suppose I prefer an analogy to the Higgs, because so many of those in the know feel sure it is really there, and just a matter of time before that is patiently demonstrated... may it still be so for the Ivory-bill... not Schrodinger's Woodpecker, but Higgs.”

Within a year the Higgs was confirmed [on Facebook I mistakenly said it was found 6 months after I wrote the above words, which may well be technically true, but the PUBLIC announcement came a year later]. The Higgs boson, once established to exist, is essentially everywhere, though; the Higgs Woodpecker, uhhh, not so much! 😟

...Meanwhile, elsewhere and remarkably, Dwight Norris’ IBWO FB group has passed the 15,000 member mark (I remember way back when I thought it would plateau at around 6500!).  Nice to see the interest in this story, but it does now make reading the daily entries quite a slog to hunt for the new/worthwhile nuggets among all the repetition and chatter.

And over at his IBWO FB page, Fred Virrazzi is promising a longish study of Alabama, which could be under-searched, sitting as it does as a sort of flyway between Florida and Mississippi/Louisiana (but never with the level of claims or attention as those states).

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