On 6/11/2018 3:22 PM, [email protected] wrote:
I am not sure this make sense (with the SWE). The cat is
always isolated, in some sense.
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IMO totally wrong. In fact now you're contradicting what you wrote
in a recent post. The cat is NEVER ISOLATED, VIRTUALLY BY
DEFINITION OF WHAT MACRO MEANS. NEVER ISOLATED IMPLIES NEVER IN A
SUPERPOSITION. AG
*
*
In the real world the cat is never isolated, nor can it be isolated
insofar as it consists of a huge number of particles already entangled
with its environment. This is the meaning of "macro" ! If you insist
on imagining it as isolated for your thought experiment, you will
generate a paradox, as Schroedinger did. AG*
Schroedinger obviously chose a cat to emphasize the absurdity, but it
also makes the analysis hard to think about. Not only is the cat
macroscopic, the atomic decay is distributed over a continuum. I think
it helps to think of a simpler experiment in which the atom is just in a
box which is lined with photographic plates. So the atom is in a
superposition of undecayed and decayed and interacted with a silver
halide atom. It is clear that it is the interaction with the silver
halide atom that gets amplified to a macroscopic dot of silver which
decoheres the system in orthogonal "worlds" in which the spot is in
different places and happens at different times.
Brent
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