Postbag

5. Put water into a small pot, then put the pot in a larger pot (after having applied a lid on an appropriate spot). Fill the second pot with water and sit watch it. Now, what happens?

1. The little pot begins to boil inside the unboiling larger pot, since you cannot see it, it isn't watched.
2. None of the pots begin to boil; the outer since you are watching it and the inner since it has to be heated to boil.
3. Your mother enters and tells you to stop playing with the pots.

Michael responds:

Shut up!

SW responds:

Whilst this is a little abrupt, I must remind readers that the research department hasn't the funds to do further research into these important matters. If anyone is willing to fund further research, or undertake the research themselves, then please let us know by writing to .

Sir,

I was distressed, as ever, to notice the unjustifiable shortage of submissions from my good self on your Letters page. You may burble on that I haven't been submitting any letters for publication, but this I feel would be a poor excuse and a damning indictment of your investigative journalistic capabilities.

On a different subject, and in reply to your experiments and some previous correspondence, there is concrete scientific evidence that a watched kettle never actually does boil.

At a quantum level, when heat is transferred through the electric element into the water molecules, the electrons in the molecules become "excited" and move up to a higher energy level. However, there is no sure way of telling when a particular electron will become excited as this happens purely at random - all we can do is to state that for a large number of electrons, a certain percentage of them will have "jumped" given a certain interval and a certain amount of energy. It all boils down to probabilities.

But when any quantum state is observed, then all probabilities are immediately resolved. So, if we look at the an electron when the probability of it having already jumped is only p=0.01, or 1%, then it will resolve to the lower energy level. Multiplying this effect out among all the electrons in the given quantity of water, it will be seen that as long as all electrons are observed when their probability of jumping reaches 1%, they will never jump, regardless of how much energy is pumped into them.

In other words, if you continue to observe the kettle, it will never boil! Any boiling that you DO notice is due to the human phenomenon of blinking.

I trust that this quantum study of the proverb will find its way onto your Letters Page - after all, if you'll publish letters from Flynn and Thomsen, you'll publish anything.

I remain, Sir, your true servant,

SW responds:

It seems to me that your argument is seriously flawed. Firstly, if there is any chance of water molecules having jumped to a higher energy level, then this should mean that there is a slim chance of it boiling. The main flaw however is that this argument seems to be a proof of the impossibility of boiling water if it is watched, while the proverb concerns itself with watching a kettle. The water within an enclosed kettle would not be observed in itself, so it would be possible to boil it, even following the above theory. Should you remove the lid from the kettle (assuming this is possible) then the boiling would be delayed by the observation of some of the quantity of water, but even here, the water would eventually boil as some of the water would be shielded from observation by the element, and sides of the kettle.

Sir,

Bibble, bibble ker-poing poing.

SW responds:

It is letters of the above quality which force me to control the number of missives from you that my journalistic abilities could allow me to print on this page.

By the way, are you THE Fat Man, aka Chris Cringle or Joe Stalin? The public need to know.