On 10/8/2024 7:29 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:
On Tuesday, October 8, 2024 at 8:23:43 PM UTC-6 Alan Grayson wrote:
On Tuesday, October 8, 2024 at 1:35:01 PM UTC-6 Brent Meeker wrote:
On 10/8/2024 4:14 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Tue, Oct 8, 2024 at 5:55 AM Alan Grayson
<[email protected]> wrote:
/> I think I get it./
*I think you don't.*
/> If you admit that Schrodinger was correct that
superposition does NOT mean a system is in all states of
its superposition state before measurement, then the
Many-Worlds interpretation is also falsified./
*But if "*/a system is in a superposition of states/*" does
NOT mean when"*/allstates/*" occur "*/simultaneously/*" then
what the hell does it mean? Even Newton, even Aristotle, even
Og the caveman, had no problem with an object being in 2
different places _AT 2 DIFFERENT TIMES_, what made Quantum
Mechanics so revolutionary is that it seem to say that one
thing could be at two different places _AT THE SAME TIME_. *
Here's how I present it in my popular lectures. There is a
range of states in a subspace "ALIVE" and another range of
states in a subspace "DEAD". The cat starts out in one of the
alive states and moves thru series of superpositions from
ALIVE to DEAD, the dark red dotted line. These are not
different simple conditions of the cat; they are different
/probability amplitudes/ corresponding to the cat's state.
The physical state of the cat is a vector in this Hilbert
space, but it is very much more complicated, and I've
collected all that complication into "OTHER VARIABLES". So the
state of the cat evolves along the magenta dotted line, which
projects onto the simpler dark red dotted line.
*But since Schrodinger idealizes a physical reality, where there
is no continuous evolution of the Cat from Alive to Dead, *
*Sure there is. Evolution of a pure state is unitary (length 1.0) so
the state vector can only rotate, hence it's tip marks out some
high-dimensional path from one state to another.*
*I don't see this as an explanation or refutation of the lesson
Schrodinger tried to offer about superposition. *
He was mocking the idea that there can be a state that's a superposition
of alive & dead because those are classical states. I'm saying he's was
wrong in his/idealization/; but he was right in /reality/. In his
idealization the box is imagined as isolating the cat and it's state
evolution is unitary, which means the state evolves without changing
length and so must trace out intermediate states. In reality a cat, a
box, even a Geiger counter, cannot be isolated and so it is the
wave-function of universe that evolves unitarily.
The question in my mind is, "Does it matter whether or not there is a
possible operator that has HALF-ALIVE-&-HALF-DEAD as an eigenket. In
some cases, like spin, we know the intermediate state exists and we
could even measure it if we wanted. But in cases like Schroedinger's
cat it's not clear that any such operator exists. Maybe it doesn't
matter because of the Other Variable dimensions in the Hilbert space.
Brent*
*
*AG*
I often see it written that "Before measurement, the system is
not in any definite state." But I think this is misleading.
The system is in a definite state, it's just not a state for
which we have an operator that would return that state as an
eigenstate.
Brent
*Without an eigenstate for the Cat's state, it's dubious whether
Schrodinger's thought experiment is valid within the context of
QM, and moreover, whether QM can be applied to macro objects which
also have no obvious eigenstates. But the SG experiment does seem
to indicate, along with Bell experiments, that it's possible for a
superposition to be valid where its constituents are all NOT
pre-existing states. Do you agree with this latter conclusion, and
if not, why? AG *
*I meant we don't have an _operator_ that returns Alive and Dead as
eigenstates. AG *
*
*
*When Schrodinger came up with his cat thought experiment he
did it to prove that Quantum Mechanics must be wrong, or at
least incomplete. But he forgot that when you're making a
Reductio Ad Absurdumproof it's important that the results be
logically paradoxical and not just very strange. What he
really proved is that Quantum Mechanics is weird. *
/> But you're not alone in denying reality./
*Yes, besides me Hugh Everett and Sean Carroll and Max
Tegmarkand a majority, or at least a very significant
minority, of quantum physicists believe that realism is
probably untrue. It looks like you believe in realism,
therefore unless you abandon the scientific method you must
conclude that locality or determinism or both are untrue. *
*> */Pretty sad when you think about it/
*That sounds like somethingDonald Trumpwould say, and in fact
he does, very often. *
John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
<https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>**
tst
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