struggling with this question. The answer we found previously, that they
are probability waves until they are observed, and things thereafter, is not
entirely satisfying, but at the moment it is the best we can do.
A Survey in Lower Wobegon
Entanglement, the last of the three conundrums of quantum mechanics
we shall investigate, can be translated into a familiar setting. Lower Wob-
egon, a town located just below Lake Wobegon,^8 differs from Lake Wobe-
gon in that not only are all the children average, the town as a whole is,
too—so average that whenever they are polled on a random subject, such
as “Do you like asparagus?” 50 percent of the respondents answer yes and
50 percent answer no.
One day, a polling firm decided to sample the opinions of couples in
Lower Wobegon. Each pollster was given three questions. Question 1 was
“Do you like asparagus?” Question 2 was “Do you think Michael Jordan
was the greatest basketball player of all time?” Question 3 was “Do you
believe the country is headed in the right direction?”
Two pollsters went into each home. One pollster would ask just one of
the three questions of the husband and the other would ask just one of
the three questions of the wife—each pollster randomly selecting the
questions. Sometimes the questions asked of the husband and the wife
were the same, sometimes they were different. When the results were
tabulated, 50 percent of the questions were answered affirmatively and 50
percent negatively, but there was something remarkable—when the hus-
band and wife were asked the same question, they always answered iden-
tically!
Scratching their heads, the pollsters tried to come up with an explana-
tion for this bizarre occurrence. Finally, it occurred to someone that per-
haps the husbands and wives all had rehearsed their answers in advance.
Even though the questions were not known, they may have formulated a
rule such as the following: if the question contains the word was, answer
yes; otherwise, answer no.
Is there any way to test this hypothesis? Remarkably enough, it can be
done. If each husband and wife has formulated such a question-answer-
ing rule, there are only four different possibilities—depending upon the
three questions, the rule may result in three yeses, or three nos, or two
yeses and one no, or two nos and one yes.
Let us look at the responses of the husband and wife to the questions
they were asked—even if they were asked different questions (of course,
58 How Math Explains the World