A man. A plan. A canal. Panama.

This impressive palindrome, much like the man-made waterway it refers to, runs the same forwards as it does backwards.

The man of note was French diplomat Ferdinand de la Ceps, who had previous success with the construction of the Suez Canal connecting the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.

His plan was to turn the isthmus into a sea level canal in defiance of

the advice from actual engineers, the much harsher climate, and rugged topography. Instead,

believing that the power of steam engines and the human spirit could overcome any challenge

posed by the natural world. Construction began on January 1, 1881, and after eight years,

the effort was bankrupt, having spent the equivalent of $287 million U.S.

and resulting in the deaths of an estimated 22,000 workers, many of whom were brought from the Caribbean and treated little better than slaves.

The U.S. eventually took over the effort, going so far as to help Panama achieve independence from Colombia,

due to treaties the latter had signed with the French, and abandoning the attempt to dig down to sea level and instead installing a series of stepwise locks that are still in use today, sending cargo forwards and backwards between

the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, saving them a journey of thousands of miles around the southern

tip of South America. In 2018, writer and director Christopher Nolan had a similarly ambitious plan

as the pre-production on his latest science fiction epic began. Little did the a author know that a chance encounter between a person and a bat would infect the world with a

novel coronavirus now named COVID-19. The resulting pandemic has shuttered theaters and long-delayed

releases for films who need the box office open to make back their budgets. Eventually, in defiance

of the filmmaker's insistence on the cinema experience, his ambitious and convoluted film about entropy flipping secret agents

was let out into the world in theaters where possible and streaming everywhere else,

letting this Schrodinger's cat out of the box for good.

But did the cat arrive alive or dead?

This week on Science Sort of, we go forwards, and then backwards,

and then forwards again to discuss tenet.

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