Can anyone elucidate on this please? Schrödinger

Penelope · Wed Apr 08, 2009 10:00 am

The following was printed in today's newspaper.

OK - Now I understand the question.....to some extent.

Can anyone help me towards understanding the answer?

Cat's out of the box

Is it possible to prove something is impossible? Answers preferred without reference to God or Schrödinger's Cat, neither of which I understand.

• Schrödinger (N&Q, 1 April) was pointing out the absurdity of the current model for quantum mechanics. The behaviour of subatomic particles appears random and unpredictable, leading to the hypothesis that it is only possible to tell what a subatomic particle is by observing it, or by its interaction with something else. This in turn led to the idea that until the point of observation or interaction, a particle in fact exists in a state when it has taken every possible course to get somewhere, simultaneously.

This people accepted on the abstract quantum level, but in 1935 Schrödinger translated it onto a level we understand with his cat-in-a-box thought experiment.

The cat is placed in a box with a bottle of poison, a Geiger counter and a radioactive source. The radioactive source decaying is an example of a random quantum event, and the Geiger counter is rigged to break the bottle of poison if set off.

Let's say there is a 50-50 chance the source will decay: at the end of the experiment it has either set off the Geiger counter and poisoned the cat, or it hasn't. Since current theory said that until you observed the source, it had both decayed and not decayed, it follows that the cat must also be alive and dead in the box, until you opened the lid to find out which it was. Now that is absurd.

What Schrödinger was doing was proving current quantum theory wrong.

MaryLupin · Wed Apr 08, 2009 11:26 am

Just a few things:

First, Schrodinger wasn't proving quantum theory wrong, he was pointing out that there would be paradox problems when applying the world of quantum mechanics to the "normal" (i.e. human level) world.

Second, just because something is absurd doesn't make it necessarily wrong. It might just be that our level of understanding is too small, or simply misapplied. As an example, imagine the reaction of a people who believe in the idea that only women are infertile to the idea of women as naturally competitive. Or applying the language of metaphor to what requires an empirical analysis - like if your surgeon wanted to cut using the edge of his tongue. Wrong. Probably needs to stay away from metaphor and stick to his text books, not to mention his (hopefully) sharp scalpel.

Third, the idea of measurement...most people I hear talk about this seem to have the idea that measurement means something people do. Quantum states are fluid, they maintain all possibilities, until the moment when differing possibilities interact. This is "measurement." When the quantum possibilities interact the possibilities collapse into a state. This collapsed state is the source of our "normal" world.

So the cat is not a quantum reality but a collapsed set of probabilities that is now a state we call "cat."

At least I think so.

Penelope · Wed Apr 08, 2009 2:23 pm

Mary thank you. That was not only an excellent explanation, but also rather an exciting path to explore further.

Am I correct in thinking of it in the same way as 'ideas' before they become manifest.

As in, we think of an idea, or are inspired. We create the work of art, or the apple pie.....and then it becomes manifest?

Quantum mechanics is before all the ingredients are mixed together, or before the paint reaches the canvas? But not before the 'idea'....they are already potential???

I can't ask my scientist husband about this......he is kind and patient most of the time....but when I put my take on things to him....he looks pained.

:weep:

MaryLupin · Wed Apr 08, 2009 4:48 pm

Well I can see how it would be metaphorically the same thing. That is, there is a liminal state where nothing seems to exist yet but there is potential for its existence and then suddently (it seems) there it is - reality manifest. That is the same in the 2 cases.

The thing about the quantum world is that (even though much more remains unknown than known) it is a world of stuff/energy. Whether it is particulate or energy strings (or both or something else entirely) the quantum world is not a world of intent or imagination. It is a world of actions and reactions.

The human mind (like the mind of other animals) is a world of intent. That is we direct our actions whether consciously or unconsciously to achieve something (like continued life, or pleasure, etc). So when a poem is being born in the imagination it is coming into being limited by the history, needs and desires of the being creating it. Quanta collapse their potential into "reality" without intent.

Do you remember Chemistry class when the teacher talked about how sodium and clorine move electrons just by being mixed together? I mean the reason that happens isn't because of any intent on the part of the atoms. It happens just because the forces react to each other, because some states are more stable than others. Like iron filings and magnets. Or the orbit of moons around a planet.

I'm a big believer in the power and usefulness of metaphor but it becomes a burden (and a deceiver) if we believe in its literal truth.

Penelope · Wed Apr 08, 2009 5:14 pm

Mary:


	Quote: Do you remember Chemistry class when the teacher talked about how sodium and clorine move electrons just by being mixed together? I mean the reason that happens isn't because of any intent on the part of the atoms. It happens just because the forces react to each other, because some states are more stable than others. Like iron filings and magnets. Or the orbit of moons around a planet.

Oh yes, thank you. I see what you mean. The bloomin' cat in the box metaphore, complicated it from my point of view, I think.

Being far more artistic by nature, than scientific, I am inclined to make up my own, often inappropriate, metaphores and when they get mixed with some one else's, then I am really in trouble. :hmm:

Thankyou Mary

Thomas Hood · Sun Apr 12, 2009 12:21 pm


	Penelope wrote: The bloomin' cat in the box metaphor, complicated it from my point of view, I think.

Repulsive and immoral, which goes to show that ability in science does not prevent one from being a moral idiot. Just perhaps Schrodinger died from radiation poisoning in an attempt to treat his TB.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrodinger
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat

Penelope · Sun Apr 12, 2009 12:52 pm

Wait a minute Tom!!!!

There never was a real cat in a box....It was just a metaphore to help us to visualise a very complicated proposition.

And if Schrodinger was a personal friend of Albert Einstein, then I don't think for a minute that he would have been a moral idiot, or even an idiot of any kind.

It is just that Quantum Mechanics is so very difficult to get ones' head around...that the metaphore is necessary for the layman.

For a layman like me, who makes up her own physics.....by metaphores, I think it is a lost cause. But I wouldn't want to blacken the poor man's name. He wasn't cruel to any cats so far as we know.

Thomas Hood · Sun Apr 12, 2009 1:10 pm


	Penelope wrote: And if Schrodinger was a personal friend of Albert Einstein, then I don't think for a minute that he would have been a moral idiot, or even an idiot of any kind.

I take it you haven't read a biography of Einstein?


	Quote: But I wouldn't want to blacken the poor man's name. He wasn't cruel to any cats so far as we know.

Schrodinger was repeated fired or denied academic appointment on morals issues, so I am hardly blackening his name.

I'm thinking that Schrodinger's thought experiment could have been prophetic, and he got a taste of his own medicine. Considering the feminism at BookTalk, it is so odd to see Schrodinger even mentioned.

Is 'metaphore' the British spelling for 'metaphor'?

Tom

Penelope · Sun Apr 12, 2009 1:32 pm

Tom, I haven't read any biographies of either Einstein or Schrodinger.

I have seen one biopic of Einstein. And read 'bits' about him here and there.

I just got interested in the 'Schrodinger Cat' metaphore some years ago. I read about it....and didn't even understand the question.

Recently, I thought I had begun to understand the question and so ventured to try to understand a little more about the answer.

But if it is going to lose me friends....I don't care enough to continue.

So what does that tell you about me?.....Pick Daises and shut up Pen!!

Penelope · Sun Apr 12, 2009 1:38 pm

P.S. Tom

Metaphor not Metaphore

As well as making up my own Religion and my own physics....it seems I also make up my own spelling......

Well, I never pretended to be anything other than the half-educated 'nit' that I am.

Thomas Hood · Sun Apr 12, 2009 3:16 pm


	Penelope wrote: P.S. Tom Metaphor not Metaphore As well as making up my own Religion and my own physics....it seems I also make up my own spelling...... Well, I never pretended to be anything other than the half-educated 'nit' that I am.

Not at all. You're the salt of the earth and help keep the rest of us from going wrong, and I am very flexible about spelling except in legal documents

You have raised a question relevant to current discussion at BookTalk: If science has something to do with morals, then why aren't scientists morally superior people?

Tom

Penelope · Sun Apr 12, 2009 3:27 pm

I don't know so very many scientists. Of the ones I do know, I know them well, and they are no more or less moral than the rest of us.

But I am beginning to think that they might be more truthful, because they live in a world where they need to prove what they propose, not just believe it.

I think science is to do with the brain...which has no moral code of itself. It is the mind/soul which give us our morals and we all have minds and souls whether we acknowedge them (and their promptings) or not. ;-)

I am quickly coming to the conclusion, that we should pay equal attention to both sides. :hmm:

Robert Tulip · Sun Apr 12, 2009 4:02 pm

Hello. I had quite a good conversation, including about Shrödinger's Cat, at a thread on the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Some of my comments there were

Quote:

My two cents, rushing where angels fear, is that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle was wrongly interpreted as a refutation of Laplace's Demon, the claim


	Quote: We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

Heisenberg was the first to show that this problem is in principle insoluble for science because of the observer effect. However, it is entirely wrong to say that because we cannot know the position and direction of a particle, that the particle does not actually have a unique position and momentum. It is just that we finite creatures cannot know it. People often equate truth with knowledge, whereas Warren's point here, as I read him, is that truth is a noumenal reality independent of human knowledge. Heisenberg did not show that the universe is indeterministic, only that it is indeterministic for science.

Heisenberg is pulled over by a policeman whilst driving down a motorway, the policeman gets out of his car, walks towards Heisenberg's window and motions with his hand for Heisenberg to wind the window down, which he does. The policeman then says ‘Do you know what speed you were driving at sir?', to which Heisenberg responds ‘No, but I knew exactly where I was.

Quote:

I'm just trying to apply a common sense logic, going back to Aristotle's principle of non-contradiction, which from my meagre understanding seems at the base of Einstein's objections to the improbable speculations of quantum mechanics as shown by the Schrödinger Cat Paradox. My impression is that the HUP is an example of the observer problem that has been magnified into a claim that just because we can't see causality at quantum scale it does not operate.

Albert Einstein, in a letter to Schrödinger dated 1950, wrote


	Quote: You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality—if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gun powder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation

Tom, your point about science and morality is rather an ad hominem attack on Schrodinger, but likely to be valid given the appalling morals of leading positivists such as AJ Ayer, as discussed by C Hitchens.

Robert

Thomas Hood · Sun Apr 12, 2009 4:14 pm


	Penelope wrote: I don't know so very many scientists. Of the ones I do know, I know them well, and they are no more or less moral than the rest of us. But I am beginning to think that they might be more truthful, because they live in a world where they need to prove what they propose, not just believe it.

Wish it were true, but it's hard to tell faked research from real.


	Quote: I think science is to do with the brain...which has no moral code of itself.

Amen, Sister Penny

Thomas Hood · Sun Apr 12, 2009 4:32 pm


	Robert Tulip wrote: Tom, your point about science and morality is rather an ad hominem attack on Schrodinger. . .

Not so, Robert. I found his proposed experiment with a cat so offensive -- clearly it's intended to shock and show that Schrodinger is above conventional morals -- that I thought, "Was this guy a Nazi?" and went looking. And, no, he wasn't, but he was an immoralist. Would you want a Schrodinger or Hitchens for a neighbor? I wouldn't.

Tom

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