On 11/7/2019 8:45 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:
On Thursday, November 7, 2019 at 9:38:14 PM UTC-7, Brent wrote: On 11/7/2019 8:06 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:On Thursday, November 7, 2019 at 8:47:15 PM UTC-7, Brent wrote: On 11/7/2019 6:39 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:On Thursday, November 7, 2019 at 6:25:37 PM UTC-7, Brent wrote: On 11/7/2019 5:01 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:There is no paradox. It's just some hang up you have that a cat can't be dead and alive at the same time. It's as though your physics was stuck in the time of Aristotle and words were magic so that "Alive implies not-dead." was a law of physics instead of an axiom of logic. In fact a moments thought will tell you that quite aside from quantum mechanics there would be no way to identify the moment of death of the cat to less than a several seconds. It would be simply meaningless to say the cat was alive at 0913:20 and dead at 0913:21. Brent You can imagine a different experiment, without cats, with the same paradoxical result. The point of Schroedinger's thought experiment was to demonstate tHE title of this thread; that there's something wrong with the prevailing interpretation of superposition. In your view I am hung up with Aristotle? In my view, you're seduced by some quantum nonsense. AGPrevailing when? 1927? There is no problem in the prevailing 2019 interpretation, except in your mind because you assume that a cat cannot be in a superposition of alive/dead even for a fraction of a nano-second...because...WHY? The radioactive atom can be in a superposition of decayed and not-decayed for a nanosecond. Why doesn't that violate your Aristotelean logic? Brent What's wrong with the interpretation that the radioactive atom is either decayed OR undecayed with probabilities calculated by Born's Rule? AGBeing in the quasi-classical state of either decayed or undecayed assumes the superposition of decayed and undecayed has decohered by interaction with the environment. The interactions that produce decoherence all proceed at less than the speed of light, so it is not instantaneous. So the atom and the cat are no different...except the time for which one can keep them isolated from the environment. Brent Maybe isolation is an idealization which never exists in nature. That would put this issue to bed. AGExcept that isolation admits of degrees, and interactions, even at the speed of light, are not instantaneous. The atomic nucleus is relatively isolated. That's why the environment has no measurable effect on its half-life. BrentBut once decoherence occurs, it's never reversed. It's permanent. So nothing can be isolated, not even the atomic nucleus. AG
But decoherence doesn't occur */at/ *the nucleus. It's an interaction of the nucleus with the environment. The alpha particle or whatever tunnels out in order to interact with the Geiger counter. But the probability of tunneling is very low per unit time. That's what I mean by "isolated", a low probability of interaction.
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