Here http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.htm in the Seminal essay on artificial intelligence, in which Alan Turing describes the famous “Turing Test,” he posits(near the end of the essay) “Suppose for instance we wanted to find a number between 50 and 200 which was equal to the square of the sum of its digits… Since there is probably a very large number of satisfactory solutions the random method seems to be better than the systematic.”
As far as I can tell, there is only one correct answer.
But that’s not what I wanted to complain about. If the box the cat is in is thin, and you can hear the cat die, where does the paradox go? You haven’t measured anything to collapse the eigenstate, and still the cat is dead.
Likewise, why couldn’t you use a proton and an anti-proton instead of waiting for a radioactive sample to decay? That way the cat would be dead much quicker.
I think that Turing meant there are multiple methods one could use to solve the problem. As far as your proton/anti-proton, I don’t know what you mean.
The point isn’t killing the cat: it’s the observability of the phenomenon. If you can hear the cat die - or hear it continue to live, perhaps by its purring - the wave state has been collapsed because you are still able to observe - by hearing, if not by sight - the state of the cat.
For Schrodinger’s Cat to truly exist, the cat must unobservable by any means. Otherwise it’s just a live - or dead - cat in a box.
You are aware that the whole thing is simply a thought experiment, and is all but impossible to carry out in real life?
Stuff like “What if you can hear the cat?” or “Scan it with infrared” or “Use an EM monitor to detect its heartbeat” and such is discarded, as they are not part of the thought experiment.
Q: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
A: “Nothing unless the actor puts on a good performance.”
Don’t forget, if you’re carrying out this thought experiment, you need to think some air-holes into the boxes, otherwise both the cats will die (does this mean that both functions will collapse the same way?)
I still think that the cat, having an interest in such things as whether it is alive or not, will be closely monitoring the experiment, tragically ruining it.
That sort of depends on whether cats can be said to have self-consciousness; can a cat think “I exist; I am alive”?
I won’t even ask if it can think the opposite.
If it can’t, then everything is still valid despite the cat’s presence. If, however, the cat can think and observe that it’s still alive, of course, we must shoot the cat to preserve the experiment.
I can’t see what’s the problem, but perhaps something escapes me : your ear is an instrument of measurement, as any other one. The cat is part of the experiment. The collapsing occurs as soon as you begin listening to the noises in the box.
Anyway, the whole thing doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me. I don’t understand why the cat itself can’t be considered as monitoring the experiment, as tavalla said. Or in other words, I don’t get why putting a man in the box instead of a cat would change anything. It seems to me that making a difference between a cat and a man is purely a philosophical concept, and whatever is used for the experiment (a bacteria, a cat, a man or possibly even a toothbrush) wouldn’t make a difference. Either the collapsing occurs or it doesn’t.
After all, even after the guys monitoring the experiment have checked in the box, the people outside the laboratory don’t know the result. Did the collapsing occurred for them, or not? And if the result is published in the newspapers, can I consider that the collapsing occured, as long as I didn’t read them?
It seems there’s something I never got, with this cat. Schrodinger should have stick to the dogs. They’re more reliable.
There is no experiment. There is no cat.
The challenge of Schrodinger’s thought experiment is to figure out how the macro world we live in connects to the micro quantum world that seems to be the basis of it. Because they don’t connect in obvious ways, the cat is not a proton, and it IS either alive OR dead, not both till you look at it, it DOES’T act like a proton, that was the paradox he was illustrating.
If you set up the triggering device to be almost instantaneous, (instead of 50% after an hour) then you don’t need to look in the box to collapse the state; you can be pretty sure the cat is dead. So really, this little cat killing conumdrum of Schrodinger relies on the time delay of the triggering mechanism, doesn’t it?
If you cannot observe in any way what is taking place in the box, there is a fundamental question about the cat that must be answered first, before you can even inquire about the health of the cat. Do you know what that question is?
Ryoushi’s point about the cat as observer is felicitous,as is tavalla’s point about Cartesian proof. However, it overlooks the telling point. The cat, as involved observer, does think that it exists. The dead cat does not think that it exists. The cat is an observer only in one of the possible states.
Furthermore, anyone with any experience with cats knows that Shrodinger’s cat is most likely asleep.
(Shrodinger asked Heisenberg if he’d fed the cat, but he wasn’t sure.)
Or, at the very least, licking itself. In its thrashings to get its tongue into its crotch, it’ll probably accidently trigger the kill-switch. Stupid cats.
There’s (a value approaching) 100% probabilty of death for Schrodinger’s cat, too, if you leave it in the box long enough, the difference being the time scale.
And if Turing meant “methods,” why did he say “solutions”? I think if you look at the whole paragraph in context, he’s implying there are lots of numbers between fifty and 200 that equal the square of the sum of their digits, when in fact there’s only one.
Damn you, Czarcasm, I had to go and find my copy of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
“…Well, some researchers were once conducting such an experiment, but when they opened up the box, the cat was neither alive nor dead but was in fact completely missing…”
[sub]I never thought DNA would be quoted in a GD.[/sub]
The point of Schrodinger’s Cat is that, for the hour[sup]1[/sup] that it is unobserved inside the box, it may be either alive or dead. Or, since both “alive cat” and “dead cat” are equally possible, the waveforms for both exist.
The point is not whether the cat lives or dies, but the waveforms that exist while it’s doing one or the other. Schrodinger originally put up the “experiment” to illustrate some problems he had with quantum theory, and how observation alters whatever it is you’re experimenting on.
[sup]1[/sup]With regard to timeframe, the original idea is that you engineer it so there’s a 50% chance of the fatal atom being emitted during the time the cat is in the box. One hour, one day - it still has to be 50%.
Absolutely correct, grasshopper!
Of course, it should have been obvious even with the help of the gentle Mr.Gentley. If you do not know what is going on inside the box, you cannot make any assumptions, including assumptions about the contents of the box. Unfortunately, this important step is often skipped when this field of study is persued, limiting the true number of possibilities that can be discussed about any non-observed sub-atomic event.
