This morning’s column was genius, thank you so much
I enjoyed the rhyme, the rhythm, the eloquence and such
I can’t rhyme or reason for understanding a word
All I know its the best poem that I’ve ever heard
Since reading Dr Suess when I was boy
did I ever read such a passage my mind could employ
I still don’t know if the cat is dead or alive
But I do know I can sleep a lot better tonight.
Hey there leandroc76
We have here a custom, amounting to more than nitpics
When in this forum, it helps us if you
include a link to the column, here I’ll do it for you!
It’s not a big problem, it happens a lot,
Soon on the frontpage will the column be not
And incidentally, this one’s one of my favs
a true Cecil classic, one of my bookmark saves.
Cute, but the article seemed to imply that Schroedinger was trying to convince Einstein that the Copenhagen interpretation was valid. This is simply not true. Schroedinger thought the Copenhagen interpretation was hogwash and thought up the cat thought experiment to try and demonstrate the absurdity of the situation in terms the average person could appreciate.
Schroedinger and Einstein were on the same side, it was Plank and I think Bohr that were at odds with them.
This apparent paradox has puzzled me for years. It took Cecil’s “Dr. Schroediger’s Cat in the Hat” to explain it to me. Huzzah and well done! (Sorry. Rhyme is not a gift that I possess.)
Thanks I’ll remember that.
Not to nitpick what’s probably my favorite of Cecil’s columns, but it’s also worth noting that the bit about shining light on a particle to measure it’s position and thus changing its trajectory is kind of an outdated (although still often quoted) explanation of uncertainty (or of the effects of making a measurement . . . there’s kind of two issues being conflated here). With entangled particles you can measure something about one just by measuring the other one . . . but you still can’t know a particle’s precise position and momentum at the same time. (You can’t know it because particle’s can’t have a precise position and momentum at the same time – you might as well ask “What one single color is a rainbow?”)
Given that momentum or velocity is a function of change in position, it is quite reasonable that both cannot be measured together. I’ve always agreed with Schroedinger because the cat knows it’s alive! (If it knows its dead then we enter a whole different realm - literally - so we’ll leave that one!).
In fact, Quantum Physics seems to me to prove what mystical religion has always said: the world we ‘create’ with experience is just a potential pre-existence (the hidden god) until Mind (the creator) gets to work on it. When Mind is ‘enlightened’ it experiences directly, before then it experiences via the senses which are part of the collective ‘illusion’.
Perhaps many different universes exist simultaneously, not excluded from each other but superimposed so that the common result is the sum of simultaneous probabilities. Tables do not levitate because the probability of all molecules moving together is so very small compared to all the others even if every observer experiences an infinitesimally different universe. Maybe, if Mind is a quantum phenomenon, one developed sufficiently can influence its local events to boost a low probability occurrence to the highest - that is, can literally work magic.
Jerseyman, while many non-physicists have attempted to use quantum mechanics as a justification for their favorite brand of mysticism, there’s really no basis for this in fact. Quantum mechanics says nothing about God, magic, enlightenment or anything like that, and it is a mistake to think otherwise.
Also, while there are various interpretations of quantum mechanics and thus various schools of thought on what constitutes a “measurement”, most physicists would agree that it is a mistake to think that measurement requires a conscious mind.
Moreover, the effect of measurement is only to cause the system to assume a state in which that measurement has a definite value – not to influence the probability of that value being one thing or another. In other words, you can change the system by performing a measurement, but you can’t make an unlikely (or impossible) outcome become likely by performing a measurement. (If you do get an unlikely outcome, then an immediate re-measurement will agree with that outcome 100% of the time – but the initial unlikely outcome was not made any more likely by your measurement.) You certainly can’t influence the result of the initial measurement by any act of willpower.
In short, quantum mechanics makes no claim that observers can make unlikely probabilities become more likely by force of will. While quantum mechanics introduces an element of probability instead of strict determinism, the probabilities themselves are as deterministic as physics has always been.