Schroedinger's Cat

[satori]

Well someone got all pissy and took their marbles with them.... so I'll give this a new post, Here's what Shroedinger actually did:

In the late 1920s the Austrian physicist Erwin Schroedinger came up with an ingenious thought experiment. His proposed experiment was to see if you can kill a cat without looking at it and without the ASPCA [1] running you down like those crazed mobs in the bad horror movies. Just kidding; actually his experiment was to prove that the field of Quantum Mechanics, which he himself had helped to pioneer, was in fact completely ludicrous. He was like the Cheshire Cat of the physics world: "We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad." (Except he didn't smile constantly and couldn't disappear.) The experiment consisted of placing three things in a sealed box: a cat, a vial of poisonous gas, and a radioactive mineral. The experiment is set up so that two conditions are true:

if the radioactive mineral decays it will release the gas in some way and thus kill the cat, and
there is a 50/50 chance of the mineral decaying in the limited time the experiment takes up.
According to the Schroedinger Wave Form Equation (developed by none other than Spiro Agnew, um, that is, Erwin Schroedinger) and the theories that go along with it, you can not determine what will happen, only the probability of a certain event occurring. Strangely, this event does not actually happen until you observe it. Let's say you shoot one photon at a photographic plate divided into two regions. There is a 50% chance of it hitting section A, and a 50% chance of it hitting section B. Until you develop and look at the plate, these are the probabilities, and both exist at the same time.

When you look at the plate, one of two things happen, depending on what school of Quantum Physics you belong to. There is the Copenhagen Interpretation (so named because that was Einstein's brand of chewing tobacco), which states that when you look at the plate, the wave form will "collapse" and the probability of the photon hitting section A will "jump" to one, while the probability of the photon hitting section B goes to zero. There is also the Many Worlds Interpretation. Here, when you look at the plate, the universe splits into two parallel universes, one where the photon hits A and one where it hits B. The Many Worlds Interpretation is the basis for the popular television show "Melrose Place" (or is it 90210?).

Because the wave form collapses or the universe splits when the system is observed, not when the event occurs, you can not tell whether the cat is alive or dead before you look in the box. Therefore, this deceptively complex cat manages to be both alive and dead at the same time, until you actually look in the box. This defies all common logic and obviously must be wrong. This is why Schroedinger created this paradox: to prove how stupid our explanations for the sub-atomic realm seem, let alone our explanations for the normal realm!

There is, however, a way around this problem. If you could look at the object without a single particle hitting it, then the wave form wouldn't collapse or the universe wouldn't split. While this seems impossible, using a device known as an interferometer and a series of light polarizers it becomes a possibility. You can conclude that something is in a location by the fact that a photon does not exhibit interference. Not only that, but it also makes thousands of julienne fries [2]. This is all thanks to the wave-particle duality of light, which is a different story altogether [3]. This proves a very important point: if man concentrates his entire brain power on one task, eventually he will get too bored, pop open a beer and watch the Jets lose.

....So in short... It's a load of bunk... Nothing has been proven here except his ability to argue a point that he can't really make.

[moogoo]

Look what I started.      

[satori]

It was a good topic, no doubt.

[moogoo]

Of course, I find this stuff totally fascinating.  

[satori]

hmmm

[SpaceMarine]

That was probably the most convoluted mish mash I've ever seen for someone who had absolutely no point to make.

I'm going to need to lie down now.

[LoneCoyote]

A few years ago I told my wife about the Schroedinger's Cat paradox and we talked about it a while. Several weeks later, when she had to go out of town to a conference, I came home from work and found a shoebox on the table. I opened it up and found a stuffed cat with a note that read, "It looks dead to me."

My wife had left it there as a joke, but it didn't dawn on me that she was refering to Schroedinger's Cat until the next day. I thought she was refering to the fact that she doesn't like cats.

[satori]

@Lone Coyote, cute! Sounds like you have a great wife there.

@SM: Well I guess I could edit out the funny bits, still, it explains the theory quite well I thought (not my explanation, I took it from a website that was trying to explain the book in a few paragraphs) I left the attempts at humour in there to illustrate that other people think that it's not meant to be taken seriously. It's just a play on scientific observation... anyhoo.... I'll send over a get well basket.  

[SpaceMarine]

     @get well basket

[Brick_Sledge]

Has anyone ever read Schroedinger's Cat Trilogy?
It's by one of the authors of The Illuminatus! Trlogy, I haven't read it yet though.

[SpaceMarine]

I think I must've missed that series.

[Ad1tu]

Well, I dunno, but thanks satori for explaining to us all why we can't prove anything.

[satori]

     heheheh... I don't think anyone was trying to prove that, just that proving Quantum theories by simple observation, or lack there of isn't the basis for anything... but if that's what you got out of it then cool.      

[sordit]

We did a lot of quantum stuff in physic lessons. It was really interesting and seemed to be one of my teacher's favourite topics. Too bad I finished school this week.    
But I'm planning to study something in that direction after finishing my alternative civilian service.