Give it back to the birds, and the bees and the Viennese

[littlelotty]

Okay, since the only kind of man I can seem to attract is a crazed maniac who wants to sleep with anything that happens to have breasts and a high-pitched voice, I'd like to introduce a bit of information to all the men out there. What Amy Renee Catherine, the beautiful redhead with aquamarine eyes with little silver flecks in them is looking for

Comments

[manawski]

In the early 1930's Erwin Schrödinger published a way of thinking about the circumstance of radioactive decay that is still useful. We imagine an apparatus containing just one Nitrogen-13 atom and a detector that will respond when the atom decays. Connected to the detector is a relay connected to a hammer, and when the atom decays the relay releases the hammer which then falls on a glass vial containing poison gas. We take the entire apparatus and put it in a box. We also place a cat in the box, close the lid, and wait 10 minutes.

We then ask: Is the cat alive or dead?

The answer according to quantum mechanics is that it is 50% dead and 50% alive.

Schrodinger's cat

Quantum Mechanics describes the world in terms of a wave function. DeWitt wrote about the cat that "at the end of [one half-life] the total wave function for the system will have a form in which the living cat and dead cat are mixed in equal portions." (Reference: B.S. DeWitt and N. Graham, eds., The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Princeton, 1973), pg. 156.)

When we open the box, we "collapse the wave function" or "collapse the state" and have either a live cat or a dead cat.

Of course, this is just a thought experiment. So far as I know nobody has actually every done this experiment.

In a sense the cat is a "red herring" [sorry!]. The paradox is just an illuminating way of thinking about the consequences of radioactive decay being totally random.

Imagine we have a friend waiting outside when we open the box. For us the wave function collapses and we have, say, a live cat. But our friend's wave function does not collapse until he comes into the room. This leads to a strong solipsism, since our friend can they say that we owe our objective existence to his kind intervention in coming into the room and collapsing our state.

As Heisenberg said, then, "The wave function represents partly a fact and partly our knowledge of a fact."

Our friend needn't have come into the room to collapse his wave function: if we have a cell phone we can call him and tell him the result of the experiment. Of course, this assumes that we don't lie to him and tell him the cat is dead when it is alive.

Unexplained but apparently true is the fact that when a state collapses, it collapses into the same state for everybody. If we see a live cat everybody sees a live cat (unless they or us are hallucinating).

As de Beauregard commented: "Finally, the need for consistency of the whole scheme leads me to think of the world we are living in as a Leibnitzian world, where cats are rather high in the hierarchy of monads." Reference: Foundations of Physics 6, 539 (1976).