An insight into my head
...and to be valid they always should be, right?
An insight into my head |
|
...and to be valid they always should be, right? |
O.K. Here's the little play on words that fucked me up for so long when it came to the shrodinger cat experiment. The problem I found, and now realise is fundamental is that the quantum world is nothing ...NOTHING like the real world. It's a crazy world where you have to leave a truck load of seemingly rational concepts behind and enter a place where nothing is 'real' or 'known'.
I'll try to explain this but I'm not studying physics and it's taking me a long time to work things out in my own head as I read up on them....We start with a cat in a box. If you've read the article you'll understand were I'm starting from otheriwise here's a quick recap. (I strongly reecomend the you try to read an actual text on this because my explanation is...err...crap.)
[The experiment involves a cat...in a box...with a radioactive source and a bit of poisen (to satisfy all you cat haters out there). The cat is either dead or alive due to some chance occurance (chance in the true meaning of the word - As opposed to a chaotic system where a logical progression can occur from seemingly random variables) In this experiment the cat is enclosed in a box where it is completly concealed from the outside world and therefore it's present state at a given point in time cannot be determined i.e. it's either dead if the radioactive source decayed and spilled the poisen in the box or it's happy and (probably) purring away contentadly waiting to be let out of this fucked up little experiment...either way we don't know which...until the box is opened!!! ]
SO...Is the cat DEAD...or ALIVE. (Here's the tricky bit for all you who skipped the nicely designed webpage link and are relying on this paragraph as an insight into a profound peice of metaphysical science) If the box is shut we can be sure of only one thing after the radioactive source has reached it's half live.. the cat is either DEAD or ALIVE. Now this state cannot be determined by anything other than the laws of chance and without looking in the box we cannot be sure either way of what happened to the cat, there are no educated gueses - it's random remember.
O.K. Now we hit the crux of the experiment, if you were an anxious scientist waiting on this presidious experiment (maybe the cat is yours and you are curious whether Mr Bo Jangles will be coming home for tea this evening) there's one sure fire way of finding out what happened to the cat - Open the box. However.. and think about this one... What can we say about the cat before you opened the box?
Pretened we're not the nosey little bastards that the world has made us and we don't open the box (remember curiosity killed the cat - maybe we figure if we leave the whole thing alone Mr Bo Jangles will be O.K.) what can we say about the cat then? Is it DEAD or ALIVE. It has to be one or the other so which is it?
Well, one important thing to do is to avoid guessing, I've spoken to so many people about this and this is the bit wher they feel obliged to guess. You don't know...you can't make an educated guess...Until we open that sucker we've no idea what happened to our little friend and all we can do is guess (guesing - chaos or random??)
O.K. the answer is that you have to take a pretty big leap into the quantum world. To find out you have to put all your shallow ingrained ideas about black or white themselves into a little box. The cat is dead/alive it isn't 'DEAD' and it isn't 'ALIVE' and most importantly it isn't 'DEAD OR ALIVE' (something can't be one thing OR the other at the same time...It's not one then the other then back to the other again It's "DEAD/ALIVE" - weird quantum concept where BOTH things are coexisting simultaneously and yet at the same time NEITHER is existing.
This is all I've written so far on shrodinger...There will be more soon...
Next episode...What happens when you open the box?
Surely what I'm really looking for is objective reality...
I flip a coin ...
Cover it, and ask you heds or tales?. You cant see the coin..Do you know if its heds or tales?
I ask you to close your eyes and I guide your hand to the coin and your fingers run over the surface. Heds you say after a brief pause. I push your hand away and cover the coin again. You can open your eyes for a moment I say. I reach over to my glass and pick the slice of lemon from it, I squeeze it, lifting my other hand from the coin enough that I can touch it with the lemon but keeping its state hidden from you. I rub the lemon over the exposed surface of the coin then quickly flick it over the table to you. Was it heds or tales?
......
At what point does the coin actually move from being heds/tales to being in one of the two states and how can this movement occur. If I was to tell you what side the coin landed on is that the same as you finding out for yourself using your senses (by touch, taste, sight etc.) What if Im lying?
I flip a coin...
Cover it, and ask you heds or Tales? You cant see the coin..Do you know if its heds or tales?
If I ask you where the Earth is you would answer, without hesitation, benieth me. By simply lifting your arms you can feel the pull of the planets enormous mass. But what if I ask you where the moon is? The moons gravitational field cause the tides of the earth
I it moves unimaginable quantities of water over the surface of the planet. This is gravitation, any object is affected by it. We notice the pull of the earth more than the pull of the moon because of its enormous size but that isnt to say that the moon doesnt have an effect, your body is 7/8s water and the moons affect alters your body chemistry. But this attraction doesnt soely affect water molecules. Because of their viscosity liquids respond to this attraction more readily. From this it is simply a matter of interpolation to see that the coin, with differing amounts of ... To Be Continued...
What happens when the journalists OUTSIDE THE LAB find out? (Mr Bo Jangles is a very important cat, don't you know.)
What happens when the people at home watch the news 4 HOURS LATER? (Think about sphere orf influence and LEMMINGS LANDMINE bouncing to their target because of each of thie their individual sphere opf influences)
What happens when the watch it live or to the signal as it's broadcast into space. (SPHERE OF INFLUENCE)
Curiosity may have killed a whole cat, but Schrodinger only killed half...
When I stop thinking you can box ME up, o.k.?