Re:What If Time Really Exists? (2008)
by stale2002 on Saturday January 07, 2017 @05:24PM
(#13347015)
This issue is that what an "observer" is isn't defined.
According to your argument, a situation like Schrödinger's cat, where a Cat is both dead and alive, is completely ridiculous.
Which is a fair point. But apparently a whole lot of quantum physicists believe that Schrödinger's cat is a perfectly reasonable situation.
Re:What If Time Really Exists? (2008)
by TuringTest on Sunday January 08, 2017 @10:19AM
(#13349993)
I never understood why the cat isn't considered an observer in that experiment. Certainly a live cat must know that it's alive?
That sounds ridiculous. The double slit experiment is a small system. The detector apparatus is much larger. The world outside of that, even more so. If your view is how the universe works, the number of superpositions of states that must exist between the "magical human observer" and the experimental result must be huge. Every particle in contact with every other particle. It seems ridiculous that the entire universe must be in superposition to give humans this special property.
The "observer" here is simply an outside system.
(FWIW, we only covered the basics of quantum mechanics in my chemistry undergrad. Perhaps a physicist can explain better.)