Numb3rs 1x08

Really good stuff in this episode. At last a question I had in my mind for years was resolved:

• How do we know that everyone has their own unique fingerprint?
• Because no 2 people have ever been found to have the same prints. It’s an assumption we make based on 100 years of empirical evidence.
• How often does one part of someone’s print resembles someone else’s?
• We’ve never done this type of population surveys.
• Isn’t random match propability the only way you have of knowing the likelihood of two prints matching?
• Random match is used in DNA analysis.
• Exactly. That’s why when experts make a DNA match they don’t say it’s a sure thing. They say it is 1 in 4 billion chance that the DNA comes from the same person. But fingerprints don’t have odds. They just match or they don’t match…

Plus a small dose of Quantum Mechanics:

• It’s like the evidence proves him rigth and wrong at the same time.
• Oh, yeah, the old paradox oh Schrodinger’s cat. There is a cat in a box, 50-50 chance it’s been poisoned. But now here’s the paradox: until such time as we can open the box and observe the cat, for that time, that cat is both alive and dead.
• I fail to see the analogy though. In reality he can’t be both right and wrong at the same time.
• No no no… The truth with Schrodinger’s cat is that the question itself is meaningless until we look inside the box.