I incurred this picture the other day, and it inspired me to make this post. Well, that, and my friend who talked about Schrodinger a lot for some time. I figured some people would find this post interesting and humorous and that is a good enough reason for me to write it.

Erwin Schordinger was an Austrian physicist. His most famous work/contribution was probably his cat in a box thought experiment. His thought experiment existed to criticize the idea of superposition. He came up with something to poke fun at superposition which is now called “Shrodinger’s Cat”.

Firstly, I will give a somewhat watered down version of what superposition is in quantum mechanics. Basically it is this idea that two truths can be held true at once (even if they conflict with each other). If there are two possibilities for an outcome of something, then both can be true and a mixture of them can be as well. Many people, such as Erwin Scrodinger, did not buy this. I kept things simple so that this didn’t seem too boring, but if you want to learn a more about quantum superposition, check out the Wikipedia page here.

Now for what Schrodinger’s paper said:

“One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.

It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a “blurred model” for representing reality. In itself it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.”

Basically since the cat has a chance of both living and dieing, it must be both dead and alive. Now the picture in this post is potentially humorous to you

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Humor, Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.