… or possibly doesn’t exist at all, according to this article about a “quantum reality” study.
I always knew that none of you were real.
This is the equivalent of turning a map face down on the table and expecting the sun to go out. Perception is not reality.
I’m starting to think that if they can’t make that distinction, we shouldn’t let quantum physicists play violent video games.
I’m real!
Don’t know 'bout you,tho.
It’s all good. We are not at all real yet we are.
Besides, how trust-worthy is a research article on quantum physics co-authored by someone named Duffus?
(OMG. Did I just say that? Please forgive me. English isn’t my first language. :D)
I thought that the wiki article already stated, and has for a few years, that the Copenhagen conference gave an interpretation that the cat was simultaneously alive and dead.
I prefer to look at the experiment from the point of view of the cat. The way he sees it, there is one probability that the physicist who stuck him the box will be alive when it’s opened, and another probability that he will suffer a fatal heart attack before that, or be run over by a bus, or something. There’s no way the cat can know until someone opens the box. Until then, the physicist exists in a superposition of “dead” and “not dead” states. It’s not just that the cat doesn’t know which because there’s a box lid in the way.
The cat never dies-quantum immortality.
We always talk about the cat but the real mystery is what happened to Schroedinger’s dog.
From the cat’s POV it’s pretty much the rest of the universe that’s in question, not just the researcher. The sun could have gone supernova while it’s in the box.
I’m thinking of patenting the Schroedinger Cat Box. Until it’s opened, you don’t know whether your cat has pooped or not. Your cat exists in a superposition of “pooped” and “unpooped” states, and until you open the box, you don’t know which state it’s in.
The beauty of it is, if you never open the box, you never have to scoop it.
If cat shit was quantum sized, scooping wouldn’t be an issue.
He was sent to the vet to be tutored.
Good to see we’re not the only ones who fight the hypothetical.
But the entire point of Schroedinger’s gedankenexperiment was to relate “weird” quantum effects to the scale of the Real World of common experience.
This allows you to treat macroscopic cat waste as if it is quantum-sized.
Just hope that it doesn’t “tunnel” over the gravitational barrier that is the side of the box. I recommend keeping the lid on tight.
I prefer to look at it from the point of view of the cat too. The way he sees it, the physicist is an asshole.
gives the ratbag cat currently stretched out on and stinking up my desk a shake
The Schrodinger cat in this house appears still to be alive and present.*
*I didn’t name him; he was part of the Mr Boods package deal
I thought the quantum item in the original experiment was an unstable chemical that might explode. There wouldn’t be uncertainty if just the cat, with or without cat shit, was in the box.
It was a vial of prussic acid that might or might not get broken, not an explosive. None of my statements preclude the existence of the prussic acid vial.
Although it seemed an awfully specific doom for the cat.
I thought the sole purpose of Schrodinger’s Cat was so that Schrodinger could illustrate the absurdity of quantum mechanics if it existed at the macro level.
“Look if QM played out in the same way at our perceptive levels, this Cat thing would happen. Crazy, hunh?”
???
Well thankfully there’s random commenters on the internet to set those silly quantum physicists straight!
However, your analogy misses its mark slightly. What’s actually being done is that there is a certain bound that all models of a certain kind, so-called maximally psi-epistemic models, must obey, which is, however, experimentally violated by quantum mechanics. Now, what’s a maximally psi-epistemic model? Well, I know I needn’t tell you, but just in case any onlookers are not up to speed with recent interpretational developments in quantum mechanics, a model is psi-epistemic if the quantum wave function is assumed to be merely a representation of our knowledge about the state of a physical system, as opposed to a property of that system itself (which latter view is known as psi-ontology).
This means, among other things, that in psi-epistemic models, two different wave functions ought to be compatible with one and the same ‘state of affairs’ in the real world; as opposed to the case of psi-ontologic models, where wave functions and those ‘states of affairs’ are in one-to-one correspondence, i.e. the wave function tells you all there is to know about physical reality.
Recently, there have been some strong points scored against the psi-epistemic view, considerably strengthening the case that actually, there is not more to the world than quantum mechanics tells us—the state of affairs is exactly given by the wave function. What started this fuss is, largely, a theorem due to Pusey, Barrett, and Rudolph, which showed that, under a mild assumption that separate preparations of identical systems are uncorrelated, psi-epistemic theories can’t reproduce all quantum mechanical predictions.
The result presented in the OP, however, takes a different tack: it’s an experimental realisation of a proposal that takes a look at the fact that certain different quantum states can’t be perfectly distinguished in a measurement. Now, this would seem to argue for a psi-epistemic perspective: we simply don’t have full knowledge of the underlying physical reality, and both wave functions are compatible with overlapping sets of ‘real’ states.
However, in order to explain the observed difficulty in telling apart quantum states, an epistemic model would have to yield the same probabilities as quantum mechanics does—i.e. given access to the underlying, real physical states, it would have to predict that drawing a physical state compatible with both quantum states is as likely as failing to distinguish both states is in ordinary quantum theory. And the punchline is, there is no model such that the probabilities fully agree with the quantum probabilities that is capable of doing this in all cases.
Or, in other words, the map is the territory—or, at least, is as detailed as the territory, such that everything that holds true of the map, also holds for the territory.
(Of course, any such theorem makes certain assumptions, and there are always ways around these assumptions if one is willing to sacrifice enough—for instance, one could suppose that the future causally influences the past, and then, one could get around the implications of the theorem. In the end, it’s always a question of how much you’re willing to pay to stick to your guns.)