Did you know the odds of a meme going viral are almost like a quantum particle popping into existence? Let’s crunch the numbers together.

The simplest way is to look at the branching ratio of a meme’s reach. If the average user shares it with a probability p, and you have N users in your immediate network, the expected number of shares after one step is Np. If you want to get into the “viral zone”, you need that expected value to exceed a critical threshold, say 10 %. For a 100‑user group, that means p≈0.1. So roughly 10 people need to share it for the meme to jump off the feed and start its own branch. In practice you’d track the actual share rate, fit it to an exponential growth curve, and look for the point where the growth rate spikes—that’s your quantum jump. Ready to plug in some numbers?