Thursday, December 4, 2008

Fringe Pushes Probability To The Limit As Characters Walk Through Walls

(Photograph by Craig Blankenhorn/FOX)
From Popular Mechanics:

Fringe's 10th episode, "Safe," opens with a team of burglars who rob banks without the tedious trouble of picking locks. Instead, the intrepid thieves change the molecular structure of the wall allowing them to pass through the wall. Unfortunately, one member doesn't make it out in time and the wall resolidifies around him. The next day the Fringe team shows up to find a dead man stuck inside a wall. We talked to experts about the real quantum mechanical phenomenon of tunneling to find out just how unlikely the scenario is.

Can people walk through walls?
Fringe loves to toe the line between science fact and fiction, but this time its tilted far over onto the fiction side. In the episode, mad scientist Walter Bishop concludes that the thieves would've needed cutting-edge knowledge of quantum physics, plus more money than many banks' assets combined, to make it through the wall. However, the closest thing to a scientific explanation Bishop offers is a lab demonstration with rice—when he puts an action figure on top of a bowl of uncooked rice, it can stand on top, but when he shakes the back it sinks to the bottom.

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