The past crystallizes out of the future
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on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.
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December 23rd, 2009 at 8:08 pm
It’s a good metaphor. You and Peggy should co-write a nerdy physics poem using it.
December 25th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Schrodinger’s boxed cat
is not both dead and alive
haz obsurvayshun
December 25th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
I like it. I don’t get it, but I like it.
December 26th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
It’s referring to the Schrodinger’s cat paradox: a cat in a box, rigged so that one of a pair of quantum events will trigger the cat’s death, and the other one will let the cat live. It’s a question of exactly when the two superimposed quantum states will resolve into a single state. In one interpretation of quantum mechanics, both of the quantum states exist simultaneously (along with a cat that is simultaneously dead and alive, somehow) until the box is opened and the act of observation by a scientist collapses the pair of states into a single state.
Personally I’ve always thought that the cat should qualify as an observer capable of resolving the quantum state in its own right.
December 27th, 2009 at 11:22 am
It’s like the silly tree in the forest thing. If a cat has a fatal quantum event in a box and no one is there to observe it, does the cat really die?