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Schrodinger's Cat Is Alive! (One-Twelfth of the Time)
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/09/schrodingers-cat-is-alive-one-twelfth-of-the-time/Schrödingers Cat Is Alive! (One-Twelfth of the Time)
KEVIN DRUMSEPTEMBER 21, 2018
Bear with me for a second while I check to see if theres any obvious outrageousness this morning that I need to comment on right away. [checks LAT, NYT, WSJ, WaPo] Nah, not really. So lets talk science.
You all know about Schrödingers cat, poor thing, dont you? The basic idea behind the experiment is that in the quantum world of particles we dont know if a particle changes state until we observe it. Before that, its in an indeterminate state doing nothing in particular. So Erwin Schrödinger proposed that we put a cat in a box along with a particle that has a 50 percent chance of turning radioactive and killing the cat. Eventually we open the box and find out what happened.
But what about the cat before we open the box? Its one thing to say that the particle is all smushed out and we dont really know what state its in. But a cat? Come on. The cat is either dead or alive. But no: Schrödinger says that the cat too remains in a mysterious smeared out state, neither dead nor alive, until we open the box. At that point the wave equation collapses and the cats fate is determined.
That sounds weird, but whatever. Not as weird as plenty of other stuff in quantum mechanics. The thing is that no one really, truly believes quantum mechanics. Even physicists. Oh, theyll do the math and produce answers accurate to ten decimal points. And the math always produces correct answers. But the answers are weird, so theres long been a cottage industry in trying to break quantum mechanics to figure out whats really going on below all the weirdness. These attempts are often very clever (physicists, right?) but they always fail.
...snip
Meh. Someone made a mistake. Eventually someone else will figure it out. Its quantum mechanics. It will never make sense to us meat machines.
¹Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. Get it? Physicists are hilarious.
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Schrodinger's Cat Is Alive! (One-Twelfth of the Time) (Original Post)
saidsimplesimon
Sep 2018
OP
Schrodinger was trying to point out the flaw in the Copenhagen interpretation...
More_Cowbell
Sep 2018
#5
Uncle Joe
(58,355 posts)1. The cat is alive if you hear it meow through the box even
though there is no visual observation.
Perhaps they should try different forms of listening to particles instead of trying to view them?
Thanks for the thread saidsimplesimon.
Marcuse
(7,479 posts)2. Schrdinger's curiosity killed the cat.
RainCaster
(10,870 posts)4. If you shake the box the state of the cat becomes obvious
Simple solution
More_Cowbell
(2,191 posts)5. Schrodinger was trying to point out the flaw in the Copenhagen interpretation...
...how it's flawed because quantum superposition obviously doesn't work with large objects.
He never subscribed to the theory that it was both dead and alive until it was observed.
Very interesting stuff.
Of potential makes much more sense when the material world is eliminated. There is no material cat, there is no out there, out there.
Uncle Joe
(58,355 posts)7. We're holographs trying to measure the holograph room.