Rain City Story

1. 

   Michael
   June 3rd, 2007 - 17:08

   Seriously? No quantum physics fans?
2. 

   rakemore
   June 4th, 2007 - 11:02

   You’re missing the Geiger counter, the radioactive nucleus and the poison gas, if you’re looking to build a proper Schrödinger’s cat in a box.
   The cat would also need to be both alive and dead, smeared out in equal parts as expressed by the psi-function. While this appears an indeterminate paradox on the macro level, 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.
3. 

   Michael
   June 4th, 2007 - 12:24

   And we have a winner. Schrödinger’s cat is the answer I was looking for. Yeah, not technically correct but then again, I didn’t take the picture. I also didn’t know you were a theoretical physicist!
4. 

   Mom
   June 4th, 2007 - 17:05

   Ok, this is way out of my league. Please tell us in laymans terms what the cat in the box means. Schrodinger’s Cat?? Ma
5. 

   rakemore
   June 5th, 2007 - 11:34

   Schrödinger’s cat is an illustration of the quantum theory of superposition, in which one object can be in two opposite states at the same time. The theory describes the nature of matter in the small scale of photons, but appears at odds with what we observe on the larger scale of our experience.

   If a cat confined to opaque box were poisoned by a device that is triggered by a random event, we can say that the cat is both alive and dead, according to quantum law, since we cannot know whether the event occurred. It is only when we open the box and the wave function collapses do we know the state of the cat . This is known as observer’s paradox, that is, the observation affects the outcome, and the cat becomes either alive or dead.

   The counter-intuitive implications of this law on the obervable level results in many problems for quantum physicists.

   (I’m sure if Schrödinger were to illustrate this law with, say, a magnetic field instead of a cat, no-one but physicists and engineers (like me) would have ever heard of it.)

   Here’s a video explanation:
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru4JmkYorrc&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwhatis%2Etechtarget%2Ecom%2Fcontent%2F0%2C290959%2Csid9%5Fgci1245943%2C00%2Ehtml
6. 

   Hilary
   June 6th, 2007 - 09:06

   Thankfully this isn’t Schroedinger’s cat – there wouldn’t have been an open top. That philosophical question is pretty disturbing to me…

   Actually, I thought that opening hte box kills the cat. So he’s alive now, but dead if you want to get to him. But I probably have it wrong. I just heard about this thing a year or two ago, myself.

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