Whatever happened to Schrodinger's Cat?

[Starkist]

Reprinted from some website:

Imagine you had a radioactive atom. Radioactive atoms have surplus energy and are unstable. At any moment it will give out this surplus energy and return to being a normal atom. There is no law in physics which allows us to say EXACTLY when this will happen. All we know is the PROBABILITY of it happening at a given time. We say it is in two 'states' - one excited and one unexcited. According to quantum mechanics as soon as we measure the atom it will definitely be in one state or the other, but until then the atom is in between, it is in a 'superposition' of each state (that is, it's a bit of both). This is fine when dealing with things like atoms, which are small and so obey the rules of quantum mechanics, but what about big things? One day, a guy called Edwin Schrodinger came up with an idea for an experiment. Put a cat into a box (he said) with a fragile bottle of a deadly poison, a hammer and a radioactive atom. If the atom decays then a mechanism detects this and swings the hammer, breaks the bottle of poison and the cat dies. If the atom doesn't decay the mechanism doesn't move the hammer, the poison stays in the bottle and the cat lives. As before, until we open the box to measure the atom we don't know which state the atom is in, it is in a mixture of the two. But, and this is the whole point of the problem, what has happened to the cat? Is the cat, like the atom, in a mixture of states - both dead and alive? So what's happened to the cat?

Quantum mechanics are fun late at night when I'm half asleep... I'll bet Toolie (R.I.P.) would enjoy this one.

[Foxx]

In this case it seems to depend on whether you heard the sound of a bottle being broken by a hammer.

[DragonCommander]

The version I heard was that the cat knocked over the bottle and released the poisonous gas inside. Then we don't know whether the cat has knocked over the bottle as is therefore dead, or has not and is therefore alive.

[Starkist]

The point is that we don't know either way. At the quantum level, when you do not know whether something is a or b, it is considered to be both. In fact if you graphed out the probability, it would be a blurring between both outcomes. Schrodinger's point is that it gets very strange when applied to reality. Though possible for a quantum particle to be in this state of superposition, it is not possible for a cat to be both alive and dead.

[TheGeepster]

Could I use this technique to raise an army of the living dead? Just curious...

[mikeron]

Originally posted by Starkist
Though possible for a quantum particle to be in this state of superposition, it is not possible for a cat to be both alive and dead. Well, I don't see why not. :p

[Trevelyan_06]

There is a theory that branches off of this. At every point that one of two things can happen, both do. One in this dimension and the other outcome happens in a parallel universe that branches off.

Physics gets real fun when you get into the Newton's thoeris. For instance light can be bent around gravity. And the closer you get to gravity the slower time goes, so theorically if you fell into a black hole you would be able to see the entire life of the universe before you die.

[Jigglysaint]

In the immortal words of another member(R.I.P): "poor bottle of posion"

[TheGeepster]

Actually, I thought the theory was that gravity tended to make time appear to run slower. I suppose I could be wrong about that though.

I know from my elementary school times that either extreme anguish either slows down time, or else it appears to slow time. That includes the anguish of the final moments of waiting on something one really desires (like summer or Christmas, for instance)

[Ich]

Einstein did an actual paper about time's relativity in this format: "Talking with a pretty girl for an hour seems like a minute, but sitting on a hot stove for a minute seems like an hour." No theory is good without expirimentation, so he did exactly that. He talked to a pretty girl for what felt like one minute, but was actually 58 minutes (rounded up to one hour). Next, he sat on a hot waffle iron (he couldn't get onto a stove because of his housekeeper) for what he thought felt like an hour, but checking his watch, only 1 second had passed. He rounded up to one minute, and then sought medical attention.