Zero Gravity: The Lighter Side of Science

Practical Corollaries To Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

By Dale Dobson

The Cocktail Corollary: No personal opinion may be freely expressed until a preliminary assessment of the listeners’ related opinions has been completed.

The Sartorial Corollary: The fashion value of any wardrobe-related purchase cannot be measured by its originator.

The Trailer Corollary: A motion picture’s true qualities cannot be measured until a ticket has been purchased, at which point opinion of the film will exist in an indeterminate state until the credits roll or the instrumentation leaves the theatre.

The Flirtation Corollary: No flirtatious comment or salacious remark may be unambiguously stated before the receptiveness of its target has been confirmed.

First Vacation Corollary: The binary state of an iron, burner, space heater or other potentially inflammatory electric device cannot be determined without returning home after merging onto the freeway.

Second Vacation Corollary: The arrival of a body in motion cannot be accelerated by repeated measurement.

The Piscean Corollary: Any inaccuracy in estimation regarding the size of any sport fish will be magnified by the number and frequency of conversational references.

The Spiritual Corollary: Evidence for any deity’s existence will be recognized in direct proportion to the observer’s degree of belief in said deity.

The Nostalgia Corollary: No element of pop culture may be accurately measured until sufficient  time has passed to document statistical significance in relative decay rates of lovabiliate and suckium.

The Fermentation Corollary: All known corollaries may be modified in an alcohol-enriched environment.

Dale Dobson writes, animates and acts in the metropolitan Detroit area, and occasionally gets around to updating daledobson.com. This article originally appeared in the Science Creative Quarterly.