The most entertaining professor at Harvard. If there were any justice, he'd assume the "Carl Sagan" pop-astronomer post. An oft-remarked comment was: "If it weren't for all the, um, math and science involved, I'd love to be an astrophysicist."
If the core was that dense maybe it collapsed on itself and became a black hole.
A cat is placed in a sealed box. Attached to the box is an apparatus containing a radioactive nucleus and a canister of poison gas. The experiment is set up so that there is a 50% chance of the nucleus decaying in one hour. If the nucleus decays, it will emit a particle that triggers the apparatus, which opens the canister and kills the cat. According to quantum mechanics, the unobserved nucleus is described as a superposition (mixture) of "decayed nucleus" and "undecayed nucleus". However, when the box is opened the experimenter sees only a "decayed nucleus/dead cat" or a "undecayed nucleus/living cat."Contrary to popular belief, Schrödinger did not intend this thought experiment to indicate that he believed that the dead-alive cat would actually exist; rather he considered the quantum mechanical theory to be incomplete and not representative of reality in this case. Since a cat clearly must either be alive or dead (there is no state between alive and dead, e.g. half-dead) surely the same must be true of the nucleus. It must be either decayed or not decayed.The question is: when does the system stop existing as a mixture of states and become one or the other? The purpose of the experiment is to illustrate that quantum mechanics is incomplete without some rules to describe when the wavefunction collapses and the cat becomes dead or remains alive instead of a mixture of both.
However, Dirk did perform the experiment, and using his clairvoyant abilities (rumors of which he spread possessing through his vehement denial of possessing them) wanted to test Schrödinger's postulate. To his suprise, Gently discovered the box to be empty. This was a most suprising development, in not so much that the cat had been stolen, but just who would want to steal a cat?
Now there has been the development of an extremely dense and higly radioactive stellar core that's been stolen! Its not so much a question of who'd want to steal such a thing, but just what connection is there between these two events? Nobody would deny that a field trip is absolutely necessary in order to examine the crime scene. That, of course, means a site visit to the radio-telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Now it is my understanding that Carnival Cruise Lines do provide transportation to that destination does it not? I'm certain these cases (being interconnected somehow) would require undercover fact finding mission to be done on certain beaches of Puerto Rico. Now what undercover fact finding mission on certain Puerto Rican beaches wouldn't require a certain quantity of umbrelly drinks?
Obviously, all expenses incurred to date (at least seven years running) in this endeavor are the obligation of a certain Mrs. Sauskind (to whom belonged the cat Roderick that Ghently used in his recreation of the Schroedinger Cat expiriment) - expenses which I believe in part contain the following (while albeit seemingly expensive it is the reason they're called expenses):