Postby Technomancer » Wed Oct 01, 2003 8:39 am
Heh. the cat was a good one.
"Feel the wrath of the bit players"- Love Hina
In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.
-- Schrodinger's Moggy explained (Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies)
(not anime, but apropos)
Your description of Schroedinger's Cat (there's a umlat over the 'o' for those sticklers among us) is pretty much right, except the primary detail. The problem rests on the quantum indeterminacy of indivdual particles. Basically, we know that particles can behave as waves (see DeBroglie), and so Schroedinger was able to describe the atom in terms of the wave equation. Max Born took this a step further and showed that the waves were waves of probability. We can't determine the state of a particle beyond it's wave function unless we actually observe it (and this act collapses the wave function). In the mean time, there remains the question of what the state of the particle actually is (it can't behave solely as a particle as evidenced by diffraction effects). In other words, it can be said to exist in some superposition of all possible states. Real-life objects don't have this problem since they contain so many particles, that wave effects are cancelled out.
This understanding of QM is obviously bizarre in terms of real life, and a lot of people reacted against it. Schroedinger posed the question as a thought experiment to expose this absurdity. The cat's state is wholly dependant on the particle's state, which is indeterminate, resulting in an apparent absurdity. Unfortuately, I can't go into too much more detail, since QM isn't a subject that I know in depth (only enough to understand device physics)
The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in corrrecting its mistakes. Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry—is not even a "subject"—but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.
Neil Postman
(The End of Education)
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge
Isaac Aasimov