Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
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Saving Schrödinger's Kitty 🐈
- Thread starter Steve001
- Start date
Is Quinn Martin still alive and making TV shows???
ETA - and I am pretty sure he had nothing to do with T.H.E. Cat anyway...……….
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"Sheee-hit Sorgent Carter!" as Gomer used to say."
Dave Rogers
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through
The most direct application of this finding to Stargate physics is that, although we can't tell far in advance when Apophis is going to send a squad of Jaffa through the Stargate, we can detect signs that the Stargate is about to open far enough in advance of when chevron 1 is engaged that there's time for Teal'c to get down to the Stargate room and be waiting for them with a staff weapon before the event horizon does that splashy thing and a bunch of serpent guards step into a completely unknown tactical situation and hope nobody's shooting at them yet. Since Teal'c is the only person who can ever hit anything with a staff weapon, the end result is that Colorado Springs is pretty safe from everything but Jack O'Neill's latest snarky comment.
Dave
smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
This dovetails perfectly with physics as I learned it at Acme University.
In pursuit of the Roadrunner, Wile. E. Coyote runs off the edge of a cliff. He's in superposition till his observation of his circumstance is complete. First he looks down, then he looks at the viewer, and then, and only then, does he plummet to the ground far below.
In pursuit of the Roadrunner, Wile. E. Coyote runs off the edge of a cliff. He's in superposition till his observation of his circumstance is complete. First he looks down, then he looks at the viewer, and then, and only then, does he plummet to the ground far below.
Dave Rogers
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through
And as a result, if, on occasion, he notices in time that he's run off the cliff and stops and backs up, he's got time to get back on to the cliff edge before the laws of physics have time to catch him up. That, apart from the coyote and the cliff, is pretty much what this publication suggests.
Dave
Information isn't propagated instantaneously. Some bit of time is needed to
inform.
In Wile E's case, he must not glance at the viewer, thus completing the waveform collapse. He must simply close his eyes and step backwards in the superposition till things have a move favorable view.
That a rather good analogy.
Do the cats have backup lights???
BowlOfRed
Master Poster
If he were, the show would need to have a nearly non-sequitor subtitle.
"Schrödinger's Kitty in Peril"
Episode 1: "The Looming Uncertainty"
smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
At which point, the edge of the cliff collapses, and he plummets to the ground anyway...
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Without disparaging the underlying science itself, the article linked in the OP isn't a science article, it's an "I ******* love science!" article. It's guff for the mass of taxpayers who don't give a crap about knowing actual science, but like the idea of being involved.
SpuriusMaximus
Penultimate Amazing
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I'm not a physicist, but I like to think I got far enough into QM to at least understand the language and the basics. (Or it may be just Dunning-Kruger speaking.)
First of all, you can forget thinking too much about the cat. Not only it was supposed to be a refutal, but to take it the scenario seriously (as in illustrating rather than refuting the whole thing) requires a certain understanding of QM where "measuring" something requires a human to do the measuring. Essentially that if everyone closed their eyes, every wavefunction in the universe would keep going uncollapsed until someone opens their eyes. Which is a rather fringe position by now. Most mainstream physicists basically think that the wave collapses when it needs to interact with *something* that needs it to be one or the other. Whether it's multiple world interpretation, or objective collapse (which really is multiple worlds without the multiple worlds
) or whatever, that's the general gist.
E.g., an electron's position in a double slit experiment is "measured" when it interacts with the screen. E.g., more to the point at hand, the radioactive decay in Schrödinger's box is "measured" when it needs to interact or not with the Geiger counter. I.e., it was solved one way or another long before the human opened the box. The Geiger counter did all the measuring needed.
But even that's a detour on my part, because more to the point: what they're talking about has nothing to do with saving the cat, other than journalistic sensationalism.
Basically what they're saying is that they set up a device that monitors an atom, and the atom can do a state transition, or not. Let's say you have an excited atom, i.e., an electron is in an upper energy band, and it can transition to a lower energy band and emit a photon. You know, like happens in a LASER or neon tube.
Now traditionally this is purely random. You can know on the average how long it stays in an excited state before doing what I just said, but fundamentally you can't know when one particular atom will.
They say that their device can detect in advance that the atom is about to do that. It still is random, and you still can't predict from the start when this will happen, but basically they say you can get notified a picosecond or two in advance that it's about to happen. And if it's important to you that that atom doesn't randomly change state, well, you could excite it right back once you detected that.
The implications for the cat are exactly none.
The implications for physics... well, without seeing the actual paper (and probably knowing a lot more than just the language and basics) it's a bit hard to tell. It sounds like they COULD have just rediscovered the LASER, by the sound of how that detector works, or maybe not. We'll see.
One problem with it, IF essentially it gives you a minimum Δt for that transition is that it would contradict how the weak force works. To wit, the uncertainty principle also says there is a minimum ΔtΔE, and E being mc2, it means a very massive particle can be spawned out of orders of magnitude less energy than its mass, IF it only lives for an incredibly short amount of time. That's essentially why neutrinos can interact with matter at all, and also why they're so hard to detect. So a minimum Δt would be a huuge problem for QM.
But I'd assume that they'd have already thought of such trivial issues. I mean, for any physicist working in research, this would be the trivial stuff.
More likely I'd say it just means that the transition basically is a process that takes a while, rather than being instant. So they can detect the start point, rather than as previously just the end point.
So without seeing the actual paper, it's hard to say exactly what the implications are, if any.
First of all, you can forget thinking too much about the cat. Not only it was supposed to be a refutal, but to take it the scenario seriously (as in illustrating rather than refuting the whole thing) requires a certain understanding of QM where "measuring" something requires a human to do the measuring. Essentially that if everyone closed their eyes, every wavefunction in the universe would keep going uncollapsed until someone opens their eyes. Which is a rather fringe position by now. Most mainstream physicists basically think that the wave collapses when it needs to interact with *something* that needs it to be one or the other. Whether it's multiple world interpretation, or objective collapse (which really is multiple worlds without the multiple worlds
) or whatever, that's the general gist.E.g., an electron's position in a double slit experiment is "measured" when it interacts with the screen. E.g., more to the point at hand, the radioactive decay in Schrödinger's box is "measured" when it needs to interact or not with the Geiger counter. I.e., it was solved one way or another long before the human opened the box. The Geiger counter did all the measuring needed.
But even that's a detour on my part, because more to the point: what they're talking about has nothing to do with saving the cat, other than journalistic sensationalism.
Basically what they're saying is that they set up a device that monitors an atom, and the atom can do a state transition, or not. Let's say you have an excited atom, i.e., an electron is in an upper energy band, and it can transition to a lower energy band and emit a photon. You know, like happens in a LASER or neon tube.
Now traditionally this is purely random. You can know on the average how long it stays in an excited state before doing what I just said, but fundamentally you can't know when one particular atom will.
They say that their device can detect in advance that the atom is about to do that. It still is random, and you still can't predict from the start when this will happen, but basically they say you can get notified a picosecond or two in advance that it's about to happen. And if it's important to you that that atom doesn't randomly change state, well, you could excite it right back once you detected that.
The implications for the cat are exactly none.
The implications for physics... well, without seeing the actual paper (and probably knowing a lot more than just the language and basics) it's a bit hard to tell. It sounds like they COULD have just rediscovered the LASER, by the sound of how that detector works, or maybe not. We'll see.
One problem with it, IF essentially it gives you a minimum Δt for that transition is that it would contradict how the weak force works. To wit, the uncertainty principle also says there is a minimum ΔtΔE, and E being mc2, it means a very massive particle can be spawned out of orders of magnitude less energy than its mass, IF it only lives for an incredibly short amount of time. That's essentially why neutrinos can interact with matter at all, and also why they're so hard to detect. So a minimum Δt would be a huuge problem for QM.
But I'd assume that they'd have already thought of such trivial issues. I mean, for any physicist working in research, this would be the trivial stuff.
More likely I'd say it just means that the transition basically is a process that takes a while, rather than being instant. So they can detect the start point, rather than as previously just the end point.
So without seeing the actual paper, it's hard to say exactly what the implications are, if any.
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SpuriusMaximus
Penultimate Amazing
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Actually, now it occurs to me: could this literally be a case of a minimum ΔtΔE? Depending on how low in the microwave range that is, if they have a very low ΔE in measuring the photons -- e.g., to definitively separate their measurement photons from the ones coming from the atom's transition -- the Δt could be actually measurable. I.e., they could be seeing just the inherent inaccuracy on the time axis of such a measurement, which may or may not be enough to occasionally make it seem like a spontaneous event that causes two things "simultaneously" (and I'm putting air quotes there because of that inherent impossibility there) to be measured as two non-simultaneous events, with one preceding the other.
Now obviously I'm not learned enough to authoritatively say that it IS so. So if anyone smarter than me wants to correct my understanding, it would be appreciated.
Now obviously I'm not learned enough to authoritatively say that it IS so. So if anyone smarter than me wants to correct my understanding, it would be appreciated.
But there's a contingent of people on psi sympathetic forums and elsewhere that would argue consciousness is the cause of the wave function collapsing. They would likely argue the mere realization by Wile E's of his predicament would cause him to fall, not his breaking the "fourth wall". They argue so because they don't like Determinism for one thing.
SpuriusMaximus
Penultimate Amazing
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If you think about it, its implications are even funnier than the cartoon version for Will E Coyote. Because most of those don't seem to include a coyote mind, and none of them include a computer measuring it. So it may be possible to have this snowball effect of an ever growing macroscopic superposition of states where the coyote either fell or didn't, either found something to eat or starved, either reproduced or got his balls caught in a bear trap, ad nauseam until finally a human is there to witness one of the possible results. Not even until Will looks down and sees the hole. Until some thousands of years later some humans finally colonize the area and the universe FINALLY has to roll every single dice involved in the chain of events towards whether they meet one of Will's descendants or not. Only THEN the universe FINALLY decides that yeah, he fell off the cliff, sorry.