8 ms·

What did Schrodinger's Cat experiment prove? (2013)

61 points by slynn12 6y ago

woliveirajr 6y ago
It proved that it was and wasn't an experiment at the same time, and that the experiment's setup was and wasn't detailed enough and you could only know it when you read the teaching material.
chadcmulligan 6y ago
So does that mean the idea of a "multiverse" is in the same box? Edit: I'll rephrase (I'm serious) - isn't the idea of the multiverse based on the schrodinger's cat in a box idea, and the need for an observer? Or is the whole multiverse idea just sci fi? Or is there another physical basis for the idea of a multiverse?
- bawolff 6y ago
  The paralell universe thingy or the "multiple worlds" interpretation (which is what i assume you mean) is one of the competing philosophical explanations for what is going on during quantum mechanics. Like most topics in metaphysics, there is no evidence either way, and there are competiting interpretations that are just as good (but don't capture the imagination in the same way). Its based off the cat experiment in that its trying to explain what is happening there metaphysically, but the parallel universe interpretation doesn't make any testable predictions beyond those made by quantum mechanics, so neither the experiment nor any other experiment, proves it. Any sort of visiting paralell universes stuff is pure sf.
  - chadcmulligan 6y ago
    yes, thanks, thats what I meant. While I'm here, something I've always wondered about the multiple worlds interpretation is where does the energy come from for all these parallel universes? Like if each possible event causes a split then haven't we just doubled the energy we started with? since we've created a whole new universe.
    - hartator 6y ago
      Yes, and there is billon of quantum events happening right now in each cubic inches of air around you. So billions of universe literally from thin air. Multiverse is fun but absurd.
      - pa7x1 6y ago
        You seem to argue from an economic point of view, as if it was too "expensive" or "wasteful" to have all those universes. But MWI doesn't add any postulates to QM, in fact it is the simplest of the interpretations and a direct translation of what the math of QM says. All those universes are as "expensive" as the quantum mechanical state superposition they represent, and the superposition is a central tenet of QM and thoroughly tested. Your conclusion could be rephrased as "quantum superposition is fun but absurd".
    - rcxdude 6y ago
      I don't think there's new energy: the 'new universe' is just a part of the evolving wavefunction, which conserves energy.
  - JohnStrangeII 6y ago
    The Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics is not "metaphysics", the theory is principally testable and falsifiable by empirical data. The experiments needed to test it are just not yet feasible. Sean Caroll has written a nice blog post about this in 2015 [1]. [1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2015/02/19/the-wrong-objections-to-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2015/02/19/the-wro...
- fsflover 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mec...
  - chadcmulligan 6y ago
    Yes thanks, I've looked at all these from time to time, but the schrodinger's cat interpretation presented here (lets call it (1) and the many worlds interpretation (2) seems contradictory to me (or perhaps the same fallacy). So in (1) schrodinger's experiment says that you can't regard the observer as being some intelligent entity, the observer is just other particles - the wave form collapses in a small delta of time, and provides the continuity we see in the macroscopic world (a lot of my interpretation here I suppose). Now in (2) isn't this the same as the problem with (1)? the collapse happens near instantaneously and so these other worlds are fleeting possibilities that never really existed, its the same fallacy as the cat in the box never really being dead and alive.
    - ShamelessC 6y ago
      >in (1)..., the observer is just other particles. It has been proven that non-concious observers can trigger a wavefunction collapse through variations of the dual slit experiment. What we don't necessarily know is exactly how the chain of wavefunction collapse occurs from e.g. the "opening of the box" to e.g. the human eye. This is known as "the measurement problem". Also, fwiw, in both the Copenhagen interpretation (1) and the Many Worlds Interpretation (2), the observer is simply any particle which measures the event. It may be more intuitive to say that as soon as particle/s depend on knowing the answer to the wavefunction collapse, it will collapse. This may be "fuzzy" as well meaning that if the particles don't need a precise answer only the amount of wavefunction collapse needed to give that level of precision will occur. >Now in (2) isn't this the same as the problem with (1)? the collapse happens near instantaneously and so these other worlds are fleeting possibilities that never really existed, its the same fallacy as the cat in the box never really being dead Many Worlds Interpretation posits that the _all_ other worlds absolutely exist before and after the collapse. After wavefunction collapse, each possible outcome occurs in a separate world. The one that "we see" is merely one outcome being experienced. Indeed, the reason this may be confusing is that you have to realize that other versions of yourself will see the different outcomes, each one convinced that they're the only version. It can sound kind of crazy and we have no way of proving the existence of these other worlds but the interpretation is still taken seriously by many in part due to it being the most literal interpretation of the Schrodinger Equations. >the wave form collapses in a small delta of time, and provides the continuity we see in the macroscopic world You refer to this as a "problem" i.e. that these collapses are vanishingly small and so we never encounter them. But we can in fact encounter them! Imagine shooting thousands of bullets through two slits with some degree of known error in aiming. The wall on the other side of the two slits will likely have holes in two vertical lines. | | This is also what happens when we measure a photon before it enters the slits. It behaves as a particle would. Now imagine you push liquid water through the slits instead. The water forms waves as it passes through the slits. The peaks of the waves when they hit the wall on the other side form something different that looks like this instead. | | | | | | | | This is what happens (after shooting multiple photons) when we make no such measurement of the photons. Now, to us, each photon comes out in different spots instead of all at once like with the wave. The first might be | And then |. | But sure enough, with enough photons it will eventually appear as | | | | | | | | This means that either: Copenhagen: A pretty literal wave of possibilities travels through the slits. When it hits the wall, this so-called wavefunction collapses into a single point. That point will be statistically likely to land somewhere on the many-lined diffraction pattern. Many Worlds: Multiple worlds exist in which each of the single points follow the different trajectories we see. They still form a diffraction pattern because these worlds are defined by the same Schrodinger Equations that may also define the wavefunction collapse. There's a lot more that I'm skipping over such as Pilot Wave Theory which posits that each particle was in fact always a particle that instead is guided by a "pilot wave" that can sort of see the future, or travel faster than light in order to determine where it should land. Ultimately what I'm trying to say though is that there is no way around quantum mechanics. Yes, the timeframes are tiny and the cat probably isn't alive and dead at the same time due to decoherence occuring well before you open the box; but reality is still very much quantum and there are ways to observe that. It's weird af, but it's absolutely happening.
- yk 6y ago
  There are several different "multiverse" ideas, from the top of my head the many worlds interpretation of QM, the string landscape, the multiverse of general relativity, the multiple branes in Randall-Sudrum models. Thing is, multiverse ideas are not testable and therefore not physics. Theorists like to entertain ourselves with them to a certain degree, but they are just that, a kind of Science Fiction. For that reason, theorists never bother to distinguish between the different kinds of multiverses, that is a tedious and ultimately not important task. Now science writers love to write about the multiverse, because they are good entertainment, however they lack the technical sophistication to actually distinguish between the different kinds of multiverse.
cd1980 6y ago
I have been mislead about Schroedinger's cat, but now I get the absurdity. However, I also feel there might be a conceptual mistake in the experiment setup: there -is- a conscious observer present inside of the sealed box: the cat. Thus there is no super-position and therefore the cat will observe itself when it dies (or stays alive), matching later experiments' results. Science: it works! But Schrodinger's attempt at absurd comedy seems to have failed.
- bawolff 6y ago
  > there -is- a conscious observer present inside of the sealed box: the cat. Thus there is no super-position and therefore the cat will observe itself I think you are misinterpreting what "observe" means in this context. Conciousness has nothing to do with it.
  - mongol 6y ago
    The article mentions "conscious observer" six times. Surely it must mean something involving consciousness?
    - ShamelessC 6y ago
      This usage is misleading and surprisingly common because it helps to frame the problem well. To be clear, an "observer" in the quantum context is merely anything which is measuring the outcome of an event. It need not be conscious but it can be. Having said that, I think you're actually correct to point this out! The cat will obviously have a look around inside the box and likely cause wavefunction collapse. I believe the cat is meant to be fundamentally unable to effect things though. After all, it's mostly an interesting problem because it posits that anything that could be "alive" inside the box would be in a superposition of alive and dead which is something that's never been observed and probably can't happen due to the unstable nature of wavefunction collapse in the real world.
juped 6y ago
I think of it as driven by thermodynamics - the state is "collapsed" when it's too informationally entangled with the rest of the universe. It's not really "collapse", just our good friend positive entropy.
- pa7x1 6y ago
  This is indeed the case, this process is called decoherence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence
lmm 6y ago
Nonsense. Under the Copenhagen interpretation (which I do not personally subscribe to, but it is a legitimate interpretation and it has its defenders), when one particle interacts with another particle that's in a superposition, the result is that both particles are in an entangled superposition. Cat, Geiger counter and gunpowder can thus all be in an entangled superposition; one can argue that this is absurd, but Einstein also thought that the EPR experiment showed that quantum mechanics was absurd, and actually that result has been experimentally verified.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Which part are you saying is nonsense? You just repeated what the article was saying.
  - lmm 6y ago
    This part of the article is nonsense: > Since that time, there has been ample evidence that wavefunction collapse is not driven by conscious observers alone. In fact, every interaction a quantum particle makes can collapse its state. Careful analysis reveals that the Schrodinger Cat "experiment" would play out in the real world as follows: as soon as the radioactive atom interacts with the Geiger counter, it collapses from its non-decayed/decayed state into one definite state. The Geiger counter gets definitely triggered and the Cat gets definitely killed. Or the Geiger counter gets definitely not triggered and the cat is definitely alive. But both don't happen.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      I think the article is just saying in practise its impossible to have entanglement on such a macro scale, so in practise the geiger counter would collapse the wave function and thus the cat would not stay in a superposition state. I don't see anything contradictory in that. But its been a very long time and my physics is pretty rusty
      - lmm 6y ago
        > I think the article is just saying in practise its impossible to have entanglement on such a macro scale That much is not true though. Of course an ordinary cardboard box does not thoroughly isolate its inside from its outside, but complete isolation is possible in other situations (e.g. two spatially separated labs making measurements at the exact same time, which has been done in tests of the Bell inequalities).
at_a_remove 6y ago
I never thought of it as something to, uh, prove but more like yet another way to point out the limits of our understanding when it comes to our ability to measure something.
- slynn12 6y ago
  My $0.02 exactly. I see this is everyday life. People think if you can't measure something it doesn't exist or isn't worthwhile. I would argue quite the contrary :)
- _alex_ 6y ago
  This exactly. The simplest explanation for quantum behavior is just that we’re unable to measure it. There are a lot of weird and magical explanations that people have come up with in order to write formulas that work.
  - badrabbit 6y ago
    I believe experiments were conducted in a way measurement capacity is irrelevant. Either it's an effect of things being rendered (as in a real "simulation",much like pixels in a game depened on the "camera" to render) or there is an undiscovered quantum property that is confined to dimensions known or unknown that have yet to be discovered. In QM you have the observer, in relativity you have the reference frame, I think physics is exploring fundamental properies of the reality we experience,that it is a subset of something else.
    - _alex_ 6y ago
      People talk about a quantum particles as being in many places at once. When you ask what that means, the explanation is that they aren’t in one place, their position is represented as a probability curve of the places that they might be right now, and then when an observer observes the particle, that curve flattens down to where the particle is. That seems like a very anthropocentric view of the universe. Why would it matter whether a particle is “being observed”, UNLESS the act of observation has a side-effect. If “observation” is purely passive then it can’t affect anything, by definition. A MUCH simpler explanation is that the way that we observe things (by looking at them) is by bouncing photos off of them. Quantum particles are small enough that bouncing a photon off of it can change its course. Here’s an analogy : you’re blind, but you’re super good at throwing and catching basketballs. The way that you observe the world is by throwing a basketball and then timing how long it takes to come back to you and catch it, and by observing if it comes back at an angle or with some spin on it. Imagine you come across a pigeon. You throw the basketball at the pigeon. You observe strange behavior of the pigeon when you “observe” it vs when you don’t. You formulate the pigeon uncertainty principle. You describe pigeons as spooky. You just accept that pigeons follow different physics than school buses.
imvetri 6y ago
There is something and there is nothing. We think we are something, but in someone else's view we are nothing. You are the cat inside the box. You exist as a person, live in a planet and the entire setup could and couldn't be real. The experiment prooves that something is uncertain and all these are nonsense.
Taniwha 6y ago
Pretty sure no one's ever actually done this experiment, have you ever tried to put a cat in a box?
- huffmsa 6y ago
  They love boxes. Or taped rectangles.
NewEntryHN 6y ago
> as soon as the radioactive atom interacts with the Geiger counter Doesn't the paradox arise precisely because the time at which the atom will interact is probabilistic?

61 points by slynn12 6y ago

It proved that it was and wasn't an experiment at the same time, and that the experiment's setup was and wasn't detailed enough and you could only know it when you read the teaching material.

chadcmulligan 6y ago

So does that mean the idea of a "multiverse" is in the same box? Edit: I'll rephrase (I'm serious) - isn't the idea of the multiverse based on the schrodinger's cat in a box idea, and the need for an observer? Or is the whole multiverse idea just sci fi? Or is there another physical basis for the idea of a multiverse?

bawolff 6y ago
The paralell universe thingy or the "multiple worlds" interpretation (which is what i assume you mean) is one of the competing philosophical explanations for what is going on during quantum mechanics. Like most topics in metaphysics, there is no evidence either way, and there are competiting interpretations that are just as good (but don't capture the imagination in the same way). Its based off the cat experiment in that its trying to explain what is happening there metaphysically, but the parallel universe interpretation doesn't make any testable predictions beyond those made by quantum mechanics, so neither the experiment nor any other experiment, proves it. Any sort of visiting paralell universes stuff is pure sf.
- chadcmulligan 6y ago
  yes, thanks, thats what I meant. While I'm here, something I've always wondered about the multiple worlds interpretation is where does the energy come from for all these parallel universes? Like if each possible event causes a split then haven't we just doubled the energy we started with? since we've created a whole new universe.
  - hartator 6y ago
    Yes, and there is billon of quantum events happening right now in each cubic inches of air around you. So billions of universe literally from thin air. Multiverse is fun but absurd.
    - pa7x1 6y ago
      You seem to argue from an economic point of view, as if it was too "expensive" or "wasteful" to have all those universes. But MWI doesn't add any postulates to QM, in fact it is the simplest of the interpretations and a direct translation of what the math of QM says. All those universes are as "expensive" as the quantum mechanical state superposition they represent, and the superposition is a central tenet of QM and thoroughly tested. Your conclusion could be rephrased as "quantum superposition is fun but absurd".
  - rcxdude 6y ago
    I don't think there's new energy: the 'new universe' is just a part of the evolving wavefunction, which conserves energy.
- JohnStrangeII 6y ago
  The Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics is not "metaphysics", the theory is principally testable and falsifiable by empirical data. The experiments needed to test it are just not yet feasible. Sean Caroll has written a nice blog post about this in 2015 [1]. [1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2015/02/19/the-wrong-objections-to-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2015/02/19/the-wro...
fsflover 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mec...
- chadcmulligan 6y ago
  Yes thanks, I've looked at all these from time to time, but the schrodinger's cat interpretation presented here (lets call it (1) and the many worlds interpretation (2) seems contradictory to me (or perhaps the same fallacy). So in (1) schrodinger's experiment says that you can't regard the observer as being some intelligent entity, the observer is just other particles - the wave form collapses in a small delta of time, and provides the continuity we see in the macroscopic world (a lot of my interpretation here I suppose). Now in (2) isn't this the same as the problem with (1)? the collapse happens near instantaneously and so these other worlds are fleeting possibilities that never really existed, its the same fallacy as the cat in the box never really being dead and alive.
  - ShamelessC 6y ago
    >in (1)..., the observer is just other particles. It has been proven that non-concious observers can trigger a wavefunction collapse through variations of the dual slit experiment. What we don't necessarily know is exactly how the chain of wavefunction collapse occurs from e.g. the "opening of the box" to e.g. the human eye. This is known as "the measurement problem". Also, fwiw, in both the Copenhagen interpretation (1) and the Many Worlds Interpretation (2), the observer is simply any particle which measures the event. It may be more intuitive to say that as soon as particle/s depend on knowing the answer to the wavefunction collapse, it will collapse. This may be "fuzzy" as well meaning that if the particles don't need a precise answer only the amount of wavefunction collapse needed to give that level of precision will occur. >Now in (2) isn't this the same as the problem with (1)? the collapse happens near instantaneously and so these other worlds are fleeting possibilities that never really existed, its the same fallacy as the cat in the box never really being dead Many Worlds Interpretation posits that the _all_ other worlds absolutely exist before and after the collapse. After wavefunction collapse, each possible outcome occurs in a separate world. The one that "we see" is merely one outcome being experienced. Indeed, the reason this may be confusing is that you have to realize that other versions of yourself will see the different outcomes, each one convinced that they're the only version. It can sound kind of crazy and we have no way of proving the existence of these other worlds but the interpretation is still taken seriously by many in part due to it being the most literal interpretation of the Schrodinger Equations. >the wave form collapses in a small delta of time, and provides the continuity we see in the macroscopic world You refer to this as a "problem" i.e. that these collapses are vanishingly small and so we never encounter them. But we can in fact encounter them! Imagine shooting thousands of bullets through two slits with some degree of known error in aiming. The wall on the other side of the two slits will likely have holes in two vertical lines. | | This is also what happens when we measure a photon before it enters the slits. It behaves as a particle would. Now imagine you push liquid water through the slits instead. The water forms waves as it passes through the slits. The peaks of the waves when they hit the wall on the other side form something different that looks like this instead. | | | | | | | | This is what happens (after shooting multiple photons) when we make no such measurement of the photons. Now, to us, each photon comes out in different spots instead of all at once like with the wave. The first might be | And then |. | But sure enough, with enough photons it will eventually appear as | | | | | | | | This means that either: Copenhagen: A pretty literal wave of possibilities travels through the slits. When it hits the wall, this so-called wavefunction collapses into a single point. That point will be statistically likely to land somewhere on the many-lined diffraction pattern. Many Worlds: Multiple worlds exist in which each of the single points follow the different trajectories we see. They still form a diffraction pattern because these worlds are defined by the same Schrodinger Equations that may also define the wavefunction collapse. There's a lot more that I'm skipping over such as Pilot Wave Theory which posits that each particle was in fact always a particle that instead is guided by a "pilot wave" that can sort of see the future, or travel faster than light in order to determine where it should land. Ultimately what I'm trying to say though is that there is no way around quantum mechanics. Yes, the timeframes are tiny and the cat probably isn't alive and dead at the same time due to decoherence occuring well before you open the box; but reality is still very much quantum and there are ways to observe that. It's weird af, but it's absolutely happening.
yk 6y ago
There are several different "multiverse" ideas, from the top of my head the many worlds interpretation of QM, the string landscape, the multiverse of general relativity, the multiple branes in Randall-Sudrum models. Thing is, multiverse ideas are not testable and therefore not physics. Theorists like to entertain ourselves with them to a certain degree, but they are just that, a kind of Science Fiction. For that reason, theorists never bother to distinguish between the different kinds of multiverses, that is a tedious and ultimately not important task. Now science writers love to write about the multiverse, because they are good entertainment, however they lack the technical sophistication to actually distinguish between the different kinds of multiverse.

cd1980 6y ago

I have been mislead about Schroedinger's cat, but now I get the absurdity. However, I also feel there might be a conceptual mistake in the experiment setup: there -is- a conscious observer present inside of the sealed box: the cat. Thus there is no super-position and therefore the cat will observe itself when it dies (or stays alive), matching later experiments' results. Science: it works! But Schrodinger's attempt at absurd comedy seems to have failed.

bawolff 6y ago
> there -is- a conscious observer present inside of the sealed box: the cat. Thus there is no super-position and therefore the cat will observe itself I think you are misinterpreting what "observe" means in this context. Conciousness has nothing to do with it.
- mongol 6y ago
  The article mentions "conscious observer" six times. Surely it must mean something involving consciousness?
  - ShamelessC 6y ago
    This usage is misleading and surprisingly common because it helps to frame the problem well. To be clear, an "observer" in the quantum context is merely anything which is measuring the outcome of an event. It need not be conscious but it can be. Having said that, I think you're actually correct to point this out! The cat will obviously have a look around inside the box and likely cause wavefunction collapse. I believe the cat is meant to be fundamentally unable to effect things though. After all, it's mostly an interesting problem because it posits that anything that could be "alive" inside the box would be in a superposition of alive and dead which is something that's never been observed and probably can't happen due to the unstable nature of wavefunction collapse in the real world.

juped 6y ago

I think of it as driven by thermodynamics - the state is "collapsed" when it's too informationally entangled with the rest of the universe. It's not really "collapse", just our good friend positive entropy.

pa7x1 6y ago
This is indeed the case, this process is called decoherence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence

lmm 6y ago

Nonsense. Under the Copenhagen interpretation (which I do not personally subscribe to, but it is a legitimate interpretation and it has its defenders), when one particle interacts with another particle that's in a superposition, the result is that both particles are in an entangled superposition. Cat, Geiger counter and gunpowder can thus all be in an entangled superposition; one can argue that this is absurd, but Einstein also thought that the EPR experiment showed that quantum mechanics was absurd, and actually that result has been experimentally verified.

bawolff 6y ago
Which part are you saying is nonsense? You just repeated what the article was saying.
- lmm 6y ago
  This part of the article is nonsense: > Since that time, there has been ample evidence that wavefunction collapse is not driven by conscious observers alone. In fact, every interaction a quantum particle makes can collapse its state. Careful analysis reveals that the Schrodinger Cat "experiment" would play out in the real world as follows: as soon as the radioactive atom interacts with the Geiger counter, it collapses from its non-decayed/decayed state into one definite state. The Geiger counter gets definitely triggered and the Cat gets definitely killed. Or the Geiger counter gets definitely not triggered and the cat is definitely alive. But both don't happen.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    I think the article is just saying in practise its impossible to have entanglement on such a macro scale, so in practise the geiger counter would collapse the wave function and thus the cat would not stay in a superposition state. I don't see anything contradictory in that. But its been a very long time and my physics is pretty rusty
    - lmm 6y ago
      > I think the article is just saying in practise its impossible to have entanglement on such a macro scale That much is not true though. Of course an ordinary cardboard box does not thoroughly isolate its inside from its outside, but complete isolation is possible in other situations (e.g. two spatially separated labs making measurements at the exact same time, which has been done in tests of the Bell inequalities).

at_a_remove 6y ago

I never thought of it as something to, uh, prove but more like yet another way to point out the limits of our understanding when it comes to our ability to measure something.

slynn12 6y ago
My $0.02 exactly. I see this is everyday life. People think if you can't measure something it doesn't exist or isn't worthwhile. I would argue quite the contrary :)
_alex_ 6y ago
This exactly. The simplest explanation for quantum behavior is just that we’re unable to measure it. There are a lot of weird and magical explanations that people have come up with in order to write formulas that work.
- badrabbit 6y ago
  I believe experiments were conducted in a way measurement capacity is irrelevant. Either it's an effect of things being rendered (as in a real "simulation",much like pixels in a game depened on the "camera" to render) or there is an undiscovered quantum property that is confined to dimensions known or unknown that have yet to be discovered. In QM you have the observer, in relativity you have the reference frame, I think physics is exploring fundamental properies of the reality we experience,that it is a subset of something else.
  - _alex_ 6y ago
    People talk about a quantum particles as being in many places at once. When you ask what that means, the explanation is that they aren’t in one place, their position is represented as a probability curve of the places that they might be right now, and then when an observer observes the particle, that curve flattens down to where the particle is. That seems like a very anthropocentric view of the universe. Why would it matter whether a particle is “being observed”, UNLESS the act of observation has a side-effect. If “observation” is purely passive then it can’t affect anything, by definition. A MUCH simpler explanation is that the way that we observe things (by looking at them) is by bouncing photos off of them. Quantum particles are small enough that bouncing a photon off of it can change its course. Here’s an analogy : you’re blind, but you’re super good at throwing and catching basketballs. The way that you observe the world is by throwing a basketball and then timing how long it takes to come back to you and catch it, and by observing if it comes back at an angle or with some spin on it. Imagine you come across a pigeon. You throw the basketball at the pigeon. You observe strange behavior of the pigeon when you “observe” it vs when you don’t. You formulate the pigeon uncertainty principle. You describe pigeons as spooky. You just accept that pigeons follow different physics than school buses.

imvetri 6y ago

There is something and there is nothing. We think we are something, but in someone else's view we are nothing. You are the cat inside the box. You exist as a person, live in a planet and the entire setup could and couldn't be real. The experiment prooves that something is uncertain and all these are nonsense.

Taniwha 6y ago

Pretty sure no one's ever actually done this experiment, have you ever tried to put a cat in a box?

huffmsa 6y ago
They love boxes. Or taped rectangles.

NewEntryHN 6y ago

> as soon as the radioactive atom interacts with the Geiger counter Doesn't the paradox arise precisely because the time at which the atom will interact is probabilistic?