To tell the full story of Schroedinger puss,
would take so much time it would cause you to cuss,
and cry, “Bugger it all, I don’t care if it died,
it’s fate leaves me with eyes wholly dried”.
But Einstein, of course, because he was German-ed
could never accept a state undetermined.
He said “You can’t be in two wheres at one time”
to try to preach so would be a crime
'gainst reason, indeed agains’t humanity.
So it wasn’t purely his sense of vanity, (or heaven forbid, insanity)
that drove him to spend his last years in a panic
and in activities increasingly manic.
He said that this schema MUST be bizarre,
or to all logic we must say “au revoir!”
Alas, in the end Albert had it wrong
though to the title of genuis his claim is still strong,
for Erwin was right, the cat sits in a world
where time and space themselves are curled
up on themselves and nothing is real
till you open the box, and hear the cat’s squeal
that tells you what happened, for though it leaves you aghast
the only things we can know are what happened in the past.
Very nice. All of this iambic pentameter is making me feel frisky. [groan]
I never really saw the problem with Schrodinger’s theory. It just proves what I’ve been saying all along. Everything is 50:50 – either a thing happens, or it doesn’t.
I love, LOVE, LOVE this question/answer.
Pure gold!
Glad they re-ran that one! Though it isn’t exactly the shores of Gitchee-goomee, it’s pretty good, and gets the idea across.
Thanks, SD!!
Enjoyable verse but it didn’t answer the basic question: How can a cat be both alive and dead simultaneously? If you’ll pardon my prose, I’ll throw my two cents in.
First, Schrodinger proposed the cat not as proof but as challenge to Bohr et al to say that something must be lacking in quantum theory if they really thought they could get a cat into a superposition of live and dead states.
Second, the cat is never both alive and dead. Quantum phenomena only work for microscopic objects. Anything macroscopic like a cat can’t maintain a superposition of states because of something called decoherence. The cat very quickly decides whether it is alive or dead.
Right- the cat itself is an observer, thus it collapses the wave itself. Thus, indeed, the cat is either alive or dead. To those that don’t belive me, the “paradox” can be expanded to include a lab assitant who opens the box. Until he reports the status to other observers- to THOSE observers (according to Shroed) the cat remains hald & half. Extend the paradox to cover every single living thing on earth- until outside observered vindicate what is going on here on the big blue marble- the cat remains neither here nor there. Thus, Shroedinger was full of balony- there is no paradox as long as there is an observer. If he had taken the same idea, applied it to some reagent & some litmus, then he might have been able to get away with “the litmus is niether blue nor pink until it is observed”- but it wouldn’t have been so interesting, and would have been quickly forgotten- at least by the layman.
Thus, Cecil did explain it- but forgot the most important part- there simply is no paradox- Shroed was wrong.
1- I love this column. It is one of the best I have read, and I am glad it appeared again.
2- The paradox relies precisely on the fact that obviously the cat cannot be both dead and alive at the same time, as we all know, but the quantum mechanics is so weird that it is what would happen could the experiment be accomplished…
Personally, I’ve always figured that the problem with the Schroedinger’s Cat thought experiment is that in the usual way of presenting it, the box is open, not closed. Sure, you can’t see into the box during the hour, but you can look into the box after you open it and see what happened in there.
To really set up the experiment properly, you have to leave the box closed at the end of the hour, and then throw the whole works into a black hole. Was the kitty alive at the time that it crossed the event horizon? That’s the real question… But it’s a rather absurd question to ask.
Here’s a bit of bad philosophy about quantum mechanics:
“it’s just too weird to be true” (in my opinion)
or, in other words: “God doesn’t play dice with the universe”(Einstein’s opinion)
So here’s an interesting thought, based on my total ignorance of quantum theory, but also based on the HISTORY of physics theories:
Remember the “ether” ??-maybe quantum theory has something in common with that bad theory.
It made perfect sense for 300 years, right? Newton had proved with prisms that light is a wave, and of course everybody “knew” that for a wave to move, it has to move THROUGH some sort of medium.So he proposed a logical theory–that space was full of a medium called the “luminiferous aether” (-later shortened to “ether”). It took a genius of Einsteins caliber to come up with a totally new way of thinking, that made the ether unnecessary.
Somehow, deep down in my gut, and with no scientific evidence to defend me, I think that all this quantum talk of particles that do and dont exist, etc, is our generation’s “ether”. Maybe, someday, somehow, somebody will come up with a new way of thinking that will not rely on particles, but on something else.
just a thought, people, dont crucify me for it, please
“He not busy being born is busy dying.” I hope that I’ve quoted Bob Dylan correctly.
–Nott
You’ve posted in an entry with the pseudonym “ivker”
without a firstname, is it “Ronald” or “Rivka”
I’d like to get to know you, please give me an answer
Are you single, unattached, perhaps a ballet dancer.
In the end I have guessed, from what you have written
(and I’m completely in tune with your notes on the kitten).
'cause Schroedinger said “an image or a model” is what the cat is,
but it’s only a woman that will insist, “Size is what matters!!”
chappachula, there’s actually something of a difference between the predictions made by the theory of quantum mechanics and the various philisophical interpretations of what it predicts. There are several such interpretations, but until they make different predictions, if they ever do, there’s no way to tell which is the right one.
The ether hasn’t been disproven; Einstein just showed that it was unnecessary. It’s just simpler to cut it out of the model if we don’t need it.
As Hawking says, a theory is just a model we use to describe the world. When two different theories make exactly the same predictions, it’s pretty useless to argue over which one is “right”. They both are.