Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for March 15, 2015

@Gokie5,

I left a late reply for you yesterday.

The darn cat is dead, and schrodinger can stuff it.

I have some problems with Quantum Physics…First of all, at the sub atomic level the universe doesn’t play by the rules anymore and I find that rude….I barely understand the normal rules of physics in the big world….Another thing is it’s all just theory now….And there is no way to verify it….I can demonstrate how gravity works just by dropping a rock…How do I show how quarks work? The other thing is…..Well, I just don’t understand it, and that’s the biggest problem…

This really misses the point. In the box is a radioactive nucleus, which when it decays, releases cyanide that would kill the cat. After one half-life, there is a 50-50 chance it has decayed. Without opening the box, we can’t know if it has happened or not. The point of the thought experiment is to relate a quantum event to the non-quantum world.

According to traditional quantum theory (the Copenhagen interpretation), until the measurement is made for a given atom there is no way to tell whether it will have decayed or not. In fact, according to quantum physics, you have to treat the atom as if it is in a superposition of states – both decayed and not decayed.

Hugh Everett’s postulate implies that the entire universe (being a single isolated system) continuously exists in a superposition of multiple states (the Many Worlds Interpretation). There is no point where the wavefunction ever collapses within the universe, because that would imply that some portion of the universe doesn’t follow the Schroedinger wavefunction.

In either case, the cat is theoretical, and no cats were harmed in this thought experiment.

Hey Varnes, there are indeed many experiments that show quantum mechanics explains things pretty well. Not too hard to find with a simple search or two.

Props for saying that it was designed to poke at the absurdity of some quantum mechanics ideas. Everyone forgets to include that the whole idea was that the experiment wasn’t intended to work.

The inhibitions of its times generated the bizarre cartoon image of a boxed cat with a nuclear decay triggered cyanide cartridge and made it acceptable. A more realistic analogy is copulation and conception. Is she or isn’t she and she is and she isn’t.

The experiment goes that the unknown of the health of the cat when it is in the box can be ALIVE an DEAD at the same time . Until the box is opened and the cat examined , we can have good an bad news , an proceed in an acceptable conclusion ,with both outcomes . ehhh The cats dead get another , from the science dept .

Schrodinger is on a road trip, when a cop pulls him over. The officer walks up and gets the okay to search the vehicle. He opens the trunk and asks, “did you know you’ve got a dead cat in the trunk?” Schrodinger says, “well, now we do.”

No way of knowing until you know.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/113/the-story-of-schroedingers-cat-an-epic-poem

This is less science, and more philosophy. Whether or not we know it, the cat is deadly or it is alive. Comes down to the tree in the forest, or your sick relative living far away. Our knowledge of the facts doesn’t ’t change the the facts.

There is no Universe…or, there IS! It’s all a Construct because You and I Exist…or, Not!

The two-slit experiment is more convincing proof of weirdness, in my mind – in it, light beam falls on two slits, and on the far side, the photons from the two slits interfere with each other to create a pattern on a piece of film. That seems fine until you turn down the intensity of the light. If you crank it down to the point where there’s only a single photon in the system at a time, you’d expect the pattern to vanish, since there’s no ‘other’ photon to interfere with. But that’s not what happens: the interference pattern remains. Quantum theory explains this by saying that the photon went both ways at once, and interfered with itself!

Someone has to report him to PETA.

Have you EVER tried to put cat in a box?

QM is spooky, at best. The bothersome thing is that although it seems counterintuitive and very unlikely, practical/experimental applications of theory result in devices/results that work. That shows that we have at least part of it is right.. I suspect that we’ve have something interesting by the tail but we’re simply not interpreting it as correctly as we will in the future.

I doubt that Schrodinger could keep a cat in box long enough for anything to decay, especially if he closed the lid. That would make the cat come out of the box, if not the radiation, in which case both Schrodinger and his cat would both be dead.

I don’t care why our universe keeps grinding along as long as the handle keeps moving.

Anyone who would seal a cat in a box is a sicko.

No one has commented on the live cat on the sofa that appears to be playing (?) dead or merely sleeping?

Gray, The Big Bang Theory is a great show. I can not imagine anyone not loving Sheldon.

NightG, you are assuming other universes both exist and are close. Could be, but no reason to do so.

Check Ludwig’s pulse…

Photosynthesis also works by quantum physicsTherefore the universe noticed it and used it long before we did.

I never could figure how that was supposed to work.

Everyone missed the joke. A sleeping cat is both dead to the world and yet still alive at the same time.

Night-Gaunt49 @cryptoengineer“Another interpretation says that it is activity between photons with very close nearby universes could explain the odd behavior.”.DavidHuieGreen said,“NightG, you are assuming other universes both exist and are close. Could be, but no reason to do so.”.Night-Gaunt49 said“No reason not to do so.”.Several reasons.Multiple assumptions to produce one explanation is philosophically frowned upon, Occam’s Razor and all that..Failure to show the assumptions actually WOULD produce the result..Insufficient contemplation of the implications involved. If every quantum possibility produced a separate universe for each solution, every radioactive atom would produce billions per second, since a decay could happen at any given time..The rest of the universe wouldn’t get the message instantly or else it WOULD. Either possibility yields results which mock the concept of close or parallel universes..And that’s just with atoms. Every photon, electron, positron, neutrino, whatever has a location quantumly uncertain..Too many variables for the simplistic parallel universe concept to be worthy of being an unsupported reasonable assumption.(No matter how much fun to contemplate.)

Schrodinger was actually using the cat-in-box model to show other physicists the absurdity of the model they were using in their attempt to explain quantum mechanics to non-quantum physicists.

It wouldn’t have hurt to make the guy actually look like Erwin Schrodinger.