That is so fucking stupid. I love it.
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GUY IN GUACAMOLE? I need to sleep
Guy: That just raises further questions!
Clean version: assist me if you would, for I seem to have fallen and cannot manage to work myself back into an upright position.
Translation: help me step-tree, I’m stuck!
So, if I open the box with the cat in it, and now know it’s fate, but you have yet to do so, is it still in a quantum superposition for you?
The analogy of Schrödinger’s Cat was actually formulated precisely to critique this oddity in quantum theory’s language.
The ‘superposition’ doesn’t actually exist. It’s just a concept which is supposed to say (and is IMHO not worth having):
- We don’t know where it is.
- We cannot measure its position, without changing that position.
The latter is the case, because our methods of measuring generally require light to see things. Light means blasting photons at the thing to measure (and having those photons bounce back into a detector/eye). Well, and photons are themselves quanta.
So, you’re trying to measure a quantum by throwing at least one other quantum at it. They don’t quite interact like when you throw a ball at another ball, but they do still interact, and therefore bounce off each other in a sense, which changes the position of the thing you’re measuring.
That’s what Schrödinger’s Cat kind of tackles. This idea that measuring something changes the thing to measure, that was contrary to all of physics so far. And as a result, many physicists erred towards the other extreme, by declaring this state of being unknowable without changing, as something completely different from traditional physics. Which it’s not. We were just always able to ignore it.
I’m gonna need people to stop using it like its a literal fact that the cat is both alive and dead until observed, then.
It’s a superposition between both states until you observe the interaction and collapse the wave function.
At the quantum level, yeah, but there is an objective truth to whether or not the cat in a box is dead before looking. Never mind that the cat itself is an observer.
the cat itself is an observer
That’s the beauty of the principle. How do you know you’re real? How do you know know you exist?
You know simply because you’re the observer. If you were stuck in a soundproof box and no one on the outside knew you were in there, effectively you don’t exist. They can’t observe you physically. So therefore you don’t exist since you can’t be observed.
Then I guess nothing is real, we’re all in a box with no one to open it and look.
And that’s the basis of the Schrodinger experiment. We can’t know something exists without observing it. We don’t know until we can see remnants of existence.
Yeah, I hate that with a passion. It confused me for so many years, and I really don’t feel like the concept is so complex, that you’d need the analogy even.
It helped my understanding a lot, to recognize that science isn’t free from journalism/people just trying to find the most engaging stories, not necessarily the most relevant or well-understood stories.
An analogy like Schrödinger’s Cat, which feels like it’s easily understandable and which seems like an obvious contradiction, despite coming from a top scientist, that’s an easy article/video to write.
And don’t get me started on the entirety of science-fiction, with its universal agreement that teleportation and time travel should be a thing, even though scientific evidence is practically non-existent.
It depends. Under Copenhagen, it’s not. Under Multiworld, it is, and you are also part of that superposition.
Copenhagen? Multiworld?
Help
Under Copenhagen, so like if you’re south of Denmark
