Physicist Kevin Drum questions if Schrdinger's Cat Is Alive!

[saidsimplesimon]

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/09/schrodingers-cat-is-alive-one-twelfth-of-the-time/

Schrödinger’s Cat Is Alive! (One-Twelfth of the Time)

KEVIN DRUMSEPTEMBER 21, 2018

Bear with me for a second while I check to see if there’s any obvious outrageousness this morning that I need to comment on right away. [checks LAT, NYT, WSJ, WaPo] Nah, not really. So let’s talk science.

You all know about Schrödinger’s cat, poor thing, don’t you? The basic idea behind the experiment is that in the quantum world of particles we don’t know if a particle changes state until we observe it. Before that, it’s in an indeterminate state doing nothing in particular. So Erwin Schrödinger proposed that we put a cat in a box along with a particle that has a 50 percent chance of turning radioactive and killing the cat. Eventually we open the box and find out what happened.

But what about the cat before we open the box? It’s one thing to say that the particle is all smushed out and we don’t really know what state it’s in. But a cat? Come on. The cat is either dead or alive. But no: Schrödinger says that the cat too remains in a mysterious smeared out state, neither dead nor alive, until we open the box. At that point “the wave equation collapses” and the cat’s fate is determined.

That sounds weird, but whatever. Not as weird as plenty of other stuff in quantum mechanics. The thing is that no one really, truly believes quantum mechanics. Even physicists. Oh, they’ll do the math and produce answers accurate to ten decimal points. And the math always produces correct answers. But the answers are weird, so there’s long been a cottage industry in trying to “break” quantum mechanics to figure out what’s really going on below all the weirdness. These attempts are often very clever (physicists, right?) but they always fail.
...snip
Meh. Someone made a mistake. Eventually someone else will figure it out. It’s quantum mechanics. It will never make sense to us meat machines.

¹Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. Get it? Physicists are hilarious.

[CaptainTruth]

1. My cat seems to always be hungry.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

2. So many questions.

How long is the cat left in the box? Is there food, water, and a litter box in it? How about some toys to play with?

And why a cat? Why not a dog? Or a ferret? Or Donald Trump?

[saidsimplesimon]

3. You would be so cruel

as to multiply a villain, like Flagg (King's villain), and send him on to infest the universe? sarcasm(big grin here)

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. LOL!

I have always found this cat problem to be very weird and somehow not real. But then, I'm not a physicist. As for Flagg, let's just leave him in the box where he can't do any harm.

[saidsimplesimon]

5. Flagg equals Trump

I would love to put our current pResident in a cell (box).

[qazplm135]

6. Assuming it's a smell proof box...

At some point, the cats need for food, water, and air would kill it even if the time-release poison hadn't.

I get the concept, but I also get the difficulty of spreading quantum events/rules to a non-quantum world.

An electron can go through two slits at once...but I can't.

I might not be able to determine the states of a subatomic particle until I observe it (and it may be in an indeterminate state until then), but if I leave a cat in a box without food or water for 7 days...it's going to be dead, regardless of whether the poison goes off or not and without me looking at it.

[saidsimplesimon]

7. Way shucks, qazplm

It is good to read a viewpoint that challenges. I hope you have as much fun pondering the light fantastic as I do. Keeping an open mind to possibilities makes life a lot more interesting. imo

[qazplm135]

8. Schroedinger himself said

it was just a thought-experiment and not be to assessed literally.

[saidsimplesimon]

9. you're good

I can't slip anything past your knowledge.

[qazplm135]

10. I'm sure one can slip all sorts of things past my knowledge

like a photon between two slits.