The solution was proposed by Everett in 1957, collapse is a subjective illusion. The dead cat and its history of decomposing for the previous hour does not materialize out of nothing from the mere act of looking at it.
No measurement is made of the cat, the Geiger counter, or the atom, by anyone outside the isolated system of the box, so according to the Copenhagen Interpretation the superposition does not collapse. The cat is both alive and dead. That is, until someone opens the door to peek inside. In that instant, the wave function collapses and the system randomly “decides” whether the cat is alive or dead. If the state collapses to that of the dead cat, what happens to the experiences of the cat who was in the superposition of being alive and dead over the past hour? Do they suddenly vanish as if they never happened at all? Perhaps they never existed in the first place, as Bohr’s anti-realist approach would answer. But this leads to another problem: if the cat is observed to be alive, do all of its memories and experiences over the past hour suddenly pop into existence? Is the cat’s experience of 15 minutes ago ever experienced? It is one thing to believe that microscopic particles might be in two different states at once, but quite another to believe the same for a large and complex system, such as a cat. The CI implies that a living, breathing cat, with a consistent history and memories of the previous hour, can instantly materialize from the simple act of observation. Schrödinger's experiment has also been extended to highlight other problems. The mathematical physicist Eugene Wigner discussed a thought experiment known as Wigner’s friend. In it, Wigner’s friend is in a room that is sealed off from the rest of the world and in that room is a box containing Schrödinger's cat. The friend opens the box after an hour and notices whether or not the cat is alive. Sometime later, Wigner opens the door to the room to check on his friend. When does the wave function collapse, when the friend checks on the cat, or when Wigner checks on his friend? If it is when the friend checks on the cat, then the isolated system, unobserved by Wigner, has already collapsed (in contradiction to the CI). Yet, if it does not collapse for the friend checking on the cat, this is another contradiction, for he has made an observation of a system in a superposition. The CI seems to have difficulties handling multiple observers. If one takes the stance that the first conscious entity to experience the result of a measurement causes collapse, whether isolated or not, this still leaves the problem of large macroscopic systems with complex histories popping into existence through observation. If we replace the cat with some unconscious device, like a sensor that prints off a receipt with the result of whether or not the poison was released, then a conscious observer opening the box causes the instantaneous appearance of the print out, oddly, with ink that has long-since dried. It has a consistent history seemingly invented at once. Einstein was most impressed with Schrödinger's paper, and in 1950 wrote Schrödinger a letter of praise, saying “You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality, if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gunpowder + cat in a box, in which the psi- function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation.” Einstein never accepted the quantum mechanics as a complete theory. To the end of his life he searched for a theory that better fit his ideals of realism, causality and determinism. But the answer he sought was there all along: in the equations of quantum mechanics. Consciously or unconsciously, however, the answer was simply too strange for anyone to consider, even for a moment. It was not until 1957, more than three decades after quantum mechanics was formulated, that anyone was bold enough to point out the answer that was staring everyone in the face. That person was Hugh Everett III. Jason On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 3:04 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Not every superposition of states implies interference. Connect the dots. > AG > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
