3 ms·
"I can’t possibly be the first person to notice that Schrödinger’s cat experiment does not change a bit if the box in which the cat resides is made of glass."
by al2o3cr 10y ago
"I can’t possibly be the first person to notice that Schrödinger’s cat experiment does not change a bit if the box in which the cat resides is made of glass."
Nor are you the first one to have missed the role of the observer in a quantum-mechanical thought experiment: you change the experiment UTTERLY by observing the cat.
There's a very detailed writeup of some similar thoughts in the Fenyman Lectures, focused on the particular case of the electron double-slit experiment and the observational consequences of trying to "see" the electrons passing through one slit vs the other using different wavelengths of photons.
- WhitneyLand 10y agoOf course. Not to mention the "reality" of QM still has parts open to interpretation. Just a few years ago people were debating if QM meant the future could change events in the past. In one interpretation that could be true, but further learning has mostly ruled it out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantum_eraser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantum_eraser
- maxlybbert 10y agoDoes the cat itself count as an observer (or, perhaps, the mechanism that releases the poison based on its measurements)? Does the observer have to be human? I've always thought is Schrödinger's cat as an argument that you can't mix classic physics and quantum physics.