Re:Best attempts so far to skin Schrödinger’s cat (2016)
by coldtea on Saturday September 30, 2017 @07:04PM
(#15375441)
>It is meaningless to talk about the cat being dead or alive before looking. This is closer to what one might call a subjective Bayesian stance.
In actual classical reality, it's not at all meaningless to ask whether the cat is "dead or alive before looking". It might be uncertain, but it's not meaningless.
One might say "I think it's alive" and another "dead" -- and they have a chance to be right even before opening the box -- we'll just need to open it and see which was right ALL ALONG.
In quantum physics, on the other hand, in most interpretations, none of them is right before opening the box. If one says "the cat must be dead", and we open the box and the cat is indeed found dead, that person, wasn't right all along. He only became right upon the opening.
That's the whole paradox that Schrodinger tried to point out as an absurd result of quantum mechanics -- but which nonetheless is accepted by physicists not as a counter-example against QM, but as something still paradoxical that actually illustrates a key point about QM.
In actual classical reality, it's not at all meaningless to ask whether the cat is "dead or alive before looking". It might be uncertain, but it's not meaningless.
One might say "I think it's alive" and another "dead" -- and they have a chance to be right even before opening the box -- we'll just need to open it and see which was right ALL ALONG.
In quantum physics, on the other hand, in most interpretations, none of them is right before opening the box. If one says "the cat must be dead", and we open the box and the cat is indeed found dead, that person, wasn't right all along. He only became right upon the opening.
That's the whole paradox that Schrodinger tried to point out as an absurd result of quantum mechanics -- but which nonetheless is accepted by physicists not as a counter-example against QM, but as something still paradoxical that actually illustrates a key point about QM.