Celebrity Big Brother and the rise of the ’quantum celebrity’ – The Guardian

The latest series of Celebrity Big Brother started recently, and it’s already proving to be awful. When you have two people thrown out within 48 hours for being dreadful humans and Katie Hopkins is still there, you know things have sunk very low, so low that several miles above is a small circle of light coming from the bottom of the barrel you scraped through many years ago.

Makers and defenders of Big Brother used to regularly refer to it as a “social experiment”, but that pretence has been largely abandoned these days. But even if those responsible genuinely did consider it an experiment, it never seemed to be a legitimate one. Experiments have to have specific methods, and the Big Brother setup ignores these entirely.

For example, what’s the hypothesis? Also, how do you know what’s causing the effects you’re observing? To be a proper experiment you need to attempt to establish what’s producing the data you’re collecting. For example, with control groups. Although how you’d set up a control group for this sort of thing is uncertain. A bunch of strangers restricted to a house that isn’t being televised?

Also, in a proper experiment you don’t start throwing variables in at random in an attempt to influence the subject’s behaviour.

So no, claims that Big Brother is about social experimentation are clearly not supportable. But that’s not to say that it hasn’t produced some interesting scientific information despite this, as the latest series provides several examples of the fact that the nature of celebrity has undergone startling changes over the past few decades, and has become so complex and uncertain that the only way to effectively describe modern celebrities is to invoke quantum physics.

The celebrity superposition

The most famous reference regarding quantum physics/mechanics is Schrödinger’s Cat, a thought experiment to illustrate how weird things that supposedly happen on the quantum level would be even weirder in our “normal” sized universe. A quantum system, such as an atom or photon, is said to exist as a superposition, which is all possible states simultaneously, until it is observed.

Trouble is, in the normal world, a lot of the possible states something can exist in are mutually exclusive, eg a cat can’t be both alive and dead, and thus we have an unsolvable paradox.

However, Celebrity Big Brother has provided several examples of people who embody this exact paradox. Whenever they announce the contestants (for Celebrity Big Brother, I’m A Celebrity… or anything of that ilk) the most common response is “who the hell are they?” And numerous contestants are referred to as a “nobody” or “non-entity”. When it finishes, they are promptly forgotten again.

Think about that; someone being observed by millions of people at primetime on a major TV channel remains an unknown. Callum Best is probably the most prominent example of this; despite having appeared on numerous reality TV shows to audiences of millions, the most prominent response he can muster is variations on “Oh, THAT guy”, thus proving it is now possible to be a paradoxical famous non-celebrity.

Celebrity duality

One of the tricky aspects of quantum entities is that they sometimes behave like a wave, sometimes like a particle, meaning both descriptions are inadequate. This is classed as wave-particle duality.

Many modern celebrities also seem to demonstrate this. As well as being both famous but “not” celebrities, they’re also known for saying things and doing things seemingly opposed to their own position or circumstances. For example, Nigella Lawson trained in medieval languages and her original career was in writing and journalism. Yet somehow she ended up as a famous cook? This is fine, you don’t need to be specifically trained in something to be good at it.

However, it can be quite alarming. Big Brother has been rife with celebrities doing or saying things that they are in no way “allowed” to do/say based on their celebrity alone. Katie Hopkins is a perfect example; she is most famous for regular comments attacking those she deems “inferior” for not meeting her own high standards for ethics and achievement, yet Hopkins achieved fame by failing to win The Apprentice, and is not above breaking up marriages if it benefits her. Exactly how this gives her the authority to condemn people for being inferior or comment on such things as how the NHS should be run is anyone’s guess, but modern celebrities seem to exist in this disconnected state where their actual properties and traits don’t fit with actual logic or rational explanation.

Celebrity entanglement

One of the more tantalising things about quantum physics is the phenomenon of entanglement. Basically, when two or more quantum objects are “linked”, they will influence each other, and continue to do so even if separated. Distance is apparently not an issue; they could be on opposite sides of the planet and will continue to behave as if they’re side by side. This opens up exciting prospects for long-range communications and the like.

Interestingly, some celebrities appear to demonstrate a similar entanglement with the source of their fame. The aforementioned Callum Best is some distance removed from his genuinely skilled but sadly deceased father, footballing legend George Best. And yet, celebrity status is applied to him for it. Similarly among the current Big Brother housemates, Alexander O’Neal and Kavana both had singing careers that made them prominent many years ago, but are still classed as celebrities now. By way of contrast, in some cases the source of fame can achieve an independent existence of the person or persons responsible for it, which is known as “The Sugababes effect”.

However, it seems no matter when they achieved their “15 minutes of fame” or if everyone has long forgotten about them, a celebrity is a celebrity for life. It’s as if modern celebrities and the source of their fame don’t obey the laws of causality. Speaking of which…

Celebrity retrocausality

One of the more “fringe” elements of quantum physics is retrocausality. Quantum particles don’t seem to fully conform to the rules of time passing, so behave in manners which suggest they can go “backwards” in time. And in the modern world, you can probably find several examples of celebrities who became famous before any discernible event that would warrant this had occurred.

For UK residents, this applies to Kim Kardashian and her clan; we’d never heard of them, then they were all over the media for no discernible reason, and now they’re on TV all the time and launching fashion lines etc, which would explain this somewhat. But this happened after they were famous?

Celebrity Big Brother has created such entities too, namely with Chantelle Houghton, famous for being a “non-celebrity” who is now a celebrity specifically because she wasn’t famous, which takes some serious mental effort to get your head around.

One thing that’s become clear from uncovering this: I’ve seriously underestimated the readers of Heat magazine, and for this I apologise.

Dean Burnett is not a celebrity, but that doesn’t mean anything anymore so follow him on Twitter just in case, @garwboy

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