On 6/12/2018 3:18 PM, [email protected] wrote:
On Tuesday, June 12, 2018 at 10:14:56 PM UTC, Brent wrote: On 6/12/2018 3:02 PM, [email protected] <javascript:> wrote:On Tuesday, June 12, 2018 at 8:20:00 PM UTC, [email protected] wrote: On Tuesday, June 12, 2018 at 6:13:04 PM UTC, Brent wrote: On 6/12/2018 10:51 AM, [email protected] wrote:On Tuesday, June 12, 2018 at 5:28:05 PM UTC, Brent wrote: On 6/12/2018 1:01 AM, [email protected] wrote:*The bottom line, or if you will, the 800 pound elephant in the room, is that the macro entities which are included in the seminal superposition of states for decoherence, are in thermal equilibrium with their environments, constantly emitting and absorbing photons -- before, during, and after their inclusions in said state. Thus, they never are, nor can they ever be isolated from their environments, making this seminal superposition of states an illusory construction. AG *Don't you see that you're just repeating the old debate about the Heisenberg cut. Where's the line between micro and macro? You think simplistically by considering only really big stuff as classical and ignoring the fact that there is a whole range of sizes. Brent * I have NOT. I have stated several times that some macro objects are EXCLUDED, such as those with well defined deBroglie wave lengths like billiard balls and Buckyballs. For the vast set of applicable macro objects, my claim remains; that there is a fallacy of including these objects in superpositions, as doing so leads to a foolish conclusion; MW. AG*You're missing the point that in every QM experiment there's a step where micro goes to macro. It doesn't solve anything to rant about de Broglie wavelengths of cats. Brent *Before the Masters of the Universe included Observers, Instruments, and Environments in the wf's, did quantum experiments imply MW (excluding the MWI based on the SWE)? AG* *As I see it, decoherence theory "solves" the cat paradox by assuming (falsely) that the cat can be isolated and then decoheres with extreme rapidly, But then we're still left with a cat which is alive and dead simulteously, but only for a very very short duration. So No, I don't see this as a solution. CMIIAW. AG*The cat is never isolated (that's a condition you just invented), but that doesn't mean it can't be split into (FAPP) orthogonal states by becoming entangled with the poison gas which is entangled with the radioactive atom which is in a superposition of decayed and not-decayed. Brent*Doesn't the superposition of states used in the cat problem. or indeed any quantum superposition, requires the system being measured to be isolated? AG *
No. The experimentally interesting cases tend to need isolation so the cross-terms of the superposition can be known and controlled, but it's not a mathematical requirement. Suppose Schroedinger, his lab, his box, and the cat were all perfectly isolated. There would be some eigenstates corresponding the cat being alive and some corresponding to it being dead and there would be others corresponding to the cat being alive+dead. But the latter would be unstable in the sense that the state of the system would evolve quickly through those to ones where the cat is dead. In theory, being perfectly isolated, it would have a Poincare' recurrence time...but it would be many times longer than the age of universe. So what do you call the states that the system is in most of the time, where the cat is dead. They are superpositions of different microscopic states which are macroscopically indistinguishable. Just as were the states when the cat was alive.
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