Quantum mechanic
Q quantum mechanic 
| |
|---|---|
| Difficulty | 9 |
| Attacks |
Claw 1d4 teleport |
| Base level | 7 |
| Base experience | 92 |
| Speed | 12 |
| Base AC | 3 |
| Base MR | 10 |
| Alignment | 0 (neutral) |
| Frequency (by normal means) | 3 (Rare) |
| Genocidable | Yes |
| Weight | 1450 |
| Nutritional value | 20 |
| Size | Medium |
| Resistances | Poison |
| Resistances conveyed |
None |
|
A quantum mechanic:
| |
| Reference | monst.c#line1727 |
A quantum mechanic is a monster with an attack that causes its target to teleport when it hits. The teleport is subject to magic cancellation. It follows the usual rules of self-teleportation, being disallowed on non-teleport levels, and permitting you to use teleport control.
Eating a quantum mechanic corpse will toggle intrinsic speed. Quantum mechanics are not considered human (or any other playable race for that matter) so you won't suffer the effects of cannibalism. They are poisonous to eat, however.
The quantum mechanic is the only member of the Q quantum mechanic monster class
Contents
Schroedinger's Cat
There is a 5% chance that a quantum mechanic carries a large box[1]. Upon opening the box, with a 50% chance a peaceful housecat named "Schroedinger's Cat" is generated; if generation or 50% chance fails, the box will contain a cat corpse named "Schroedinger's Cat". The state of the cat is not determined until the box is opened. In fact, the large box is effectively empty until opened. There is nothing special about the cat; it is just a physics joke.
Messages
- Your position suddenly seems very uncertain!
- A quantum mechanic hit you and you attempted to teleport.
- Your velocity suddenly seems very uncertain!
- You ate a quantum mechanic corpse and your intrinsic speed is about to be toggled.
- You seem slower.
- Your intrinsic speed was toggled off.
- You seem faster.
- Your intrinsic speed was toggled on.
- Having determined the quantum mechanic's speed, you are unable to know its location.
- You applied a stethoscope to a quantum mechanic and received a message of its status.
Strategy
Eating a Quantum Mechanic corpse is a useful way to gain the speed intrinsic. If you already have intrinsic speed, however, you will lose it, so be careful! You may tin its corpse for situations where intrinsic speed is lost (attacks of cockatrice, green slime, or shade). The same can be done with a wand of speed monster, but the wand can thus be saved for pets (especially after Orcus-town). A stethoscope can be used to determine the speed intrinsics of yourself or pets.
Pet
Be careful, having a quantum mechanic as a pet may be useful, but dangerous. It may teleport shopkeepers out of their shops if its level is high enough, which angers them.
Origin
This monster's name is a play on words with "Quantum Mechanics", a branch of physics. The messages that accompany the monster's teleporting attack and the toggling of intrinsic speed are jokes based on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that measuring the position of a particle makes its velocity more uncertain, and vice versa. Toggling the speed intrinsic could also be a reference to the transitions that occur between discrete energy levels in quantum mechanics.
Schrödinger's cat is a famous thought experiment in quantum mechanics involving imagining locking a cat in a box with a mechanism that has a 50% chance of killing the cat, depending upon the final state of a quantum system, for example whether an unstable nucleus has decayed within a certain time. The orthodox Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics asserts that the cat in the box is in a superposition of possible outcomes, in half of which the cat is dead, and half of which it is alive. Only when the box is opened and "observed" does the quantum wavefunction collapse, and the fate of the cat become determined. Schrödinger asserted that this was absurd, and thus so was the Copenhagen interpretation. Physicists are still divided on this matter. Note that this was a thought experiment; no actual cats were killed, or even half-killed.
Encyclopedia entry
Quantum mechanic
These creatures are not native to this universe; they seem
to have strangely derived powers, and unknown motives.
_Uncertainty Principle_ The principle that it is not possible
to know with unlimited accuracy both the position and momentum
of a particle. ... An explanation of the uncertainty is that
in order to locate a particle exactly, an observer must be
able to bounce off it a photon of radiation; this act of
location itself alters the position of the particle
in an unpredictable way. To locate the position accurately,
photons of short wavelength would have to be used. The high
momentum of such photons would cause a large effect on the
position. On the other hand, using photons of lower momenta
would have less effect on the particle's position, but would
be less accurate because of the lower wavelength.
[ A Concise Dictionary of Physics ]
Schroedinger's Cat
Imagine a sealed container, so perfectly constructed that no
physical influence can pass either inwards or outwards across its
walls. Imagine that inside the container is a cat, and also a
device that can be triggered by some quantum event. If that event
takes place, then the device smashes a phial containing cyanide and
the cat is killed. If the event does not take place, the cat lives
on. In Schroedinger's original version, the quantum event was the
decay of a radioactive atom. ... To the outside observer, the cat
is indeed in a linear combination of being alive and dead, and only
when the container is finally opened would the cat's state vector
collapse into one or the other. On the other hand, to a (suitably
protected) observer inside the container, the cat's state-vector
would have collapsed much earlier, and the outside observer's
linear combination has no relevance.
[ The Emperor's New Mind, by Roger Penrose ]
References
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It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.6.1. Information on this page may be out of date.
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