Remember the Schroedinger’s cat trick?
Put Mr. Whiskers in a box along with a quantum particle with a half-life of an hour. Hook up a detector to a vial of cyanide so that if the particle decays it sets off the detector which opens the vial and the cat bites the green weenie. Close the box and wait an hour.
Is Mr. Whiskers alive or dead?
The odds are 50/50.
Due to some weird principles of quantum mechanics that we don’t need to go into now (though we can if you want,)Mr. Whiskers is neither. The act of observation will seal his fate, and the cat is neither alive nor dead until somebody looks in and observes it.
Sounds pretty fishy doesn’t it?
The cat’s either alive or dead, right? There ain’t no in between.
What Shroedinger was really implying was that it was both.
Another way to look at it is like this:
Poke two holes in a piece of cardboard just big enough to let a photon pass through. Shoot 100 photons at the board.
50 photons go through hole A and fifty go through B.
Now cover up hole B. What you probably expect to happen is fifty photons will go through hole A, and 50 photons will crack their skulls against closed hole B, right?
Nope. All 100 go through hole A.
That was pretty smart for a stupid photon wasn’t it?
Let’s do it another way. Let’s randomly close one hole, so we don’t know which one is open. Let’s put a basket behind each hole, shoot our photons, and then we will go and see which basket our photons are in.
From our previous experiment we know photons are “smart” They know if one hole is closed and all pile through the other. Therefore we should expect to find either 100 photons in basket A, or in Basket B. Right?
We do the experiment check our baskets, and guess what? 50 of the photons are in basket A, and 50 photons are in basket B.
Holy &*%$ing @%&#!!!
That’s impossible. We know that one of the baskets has to be empty. If one of the holes is covered, there is absolutely no way a photon could get through.
Being reasonable people we go and slap our lab assistant upside his worthless head for playing a practical joke.
We do the experiment again, and this time we are really, really careful.
50 photons in basket A, 50 photons in basket B.
“Crap!!!” You shout. “I should’ve been an accountant,” and you go home.
Other scientists get the exact same results. There is nothing wrong with the experiment.
It took a lot of math to finally figure out what was going on.
Somebody WAS screwing with the experiment.
There are actually 200 photons.
“No way! Jose.” you say. “I was careful. I counted. There were only 100 photons.”
Sure. You are right. There were only 100 photons in YOUR universe.
Let’s pretend for a second that in an alternate universe (let’s call it France,) there is a French version of yourself conducting the same experiment with his bag of 100 Photons. Furthermore, we happen to know for purposes of this experiment that photons are very cosmopolitan particles. They know no borders, and are as comfortable here in our universe as they are in France. In short there is now no such thing as a French photon.
Let’s look at both of these experiments again.
In the first experiment we shut hole B. Somehow all the photons knew this and went through hole A. What we were expecting was 50 through A, and the rest to bounce off of closed hole B.
From our new perspective with knowledge of France, what happened was this:
We shot 100 photons at the board. 50 went through hole A. The other 50 found hole B, closed. These 50 instead of banging themselves against the closed hole, left our Universe and travelled to Alternate Universe France where the experiment was being run with hole A closed and B open. Finding a warm welcome in France, they proceeded through the open hole B to be counted by our French counterpart.
Meanwhile, 50 photons in France found hole A closed, so they switched over to our universe where the hole was open, and landed in our basket along with 50 of our photons.
Net result: 100 photons in basket A here, 100 photons in basket B in France.
In the second experiment where one of the holes is randomly closed, something similar happens. If a photon finds the hole closed here it just switches over to France where the hole is open. The French particles come through our open hole.
Both holes are open (one here and one in France).
Similarly Mr. Whiskers may be dead here, but he’s also alive and well and living in France!!
I’ve taken some liberties in altering the experiments for easy explanation. But, essentially, what I have explained above is what happens.
I think science needs to work harder on this subject. I think we should figure out a way to conquer France. Then I could bring my French self over here, and make him work. I could bring the French version of my wife over here, and make her cook and clean and such. Me and my wife could just stay home in bed.
“Don’t just stand there in Uffish thought!”
-The Caterpillar
