Harry, I suspect that light reaching the Earth from a far distant star would not be expected to travel in a straight line. It is well known that light bends as it passes through a medium and it seems reasonable to assume that the dust and gas between the us and that star would ensure that this happens. I visualize the pencil placed within a glass of water and recall how dramatic this can be.
If you desire to poison your cat, perhaps you can adjust the emission angle slightly. It is not obvious how the target would appear to the source moving at right angles to the path. Your example might make more sense if you look into that issue in detail. Also, are you assuming that this experiment is taking place in a vacuum? Dave -----Original Message----- From: H Veeder <hveeder...@gmail.com> To: vortex-l <vortex-l@eskimo.com> Sent: Sun, Mar 16, 2014 2:12 am Subject: [Vo]:A relativistic Shrödinger's cat >From the appendix of the paper "Stellar Aberration: the Contradiction between Einstein and Bradley" http://redshift.vif.com/JournalFiles/V14NO2PDF/V14N2RUS.pdf Apeiron, Vol. 14, No 2, April 2007 111 © 2007 C. Roy Keys Inc. — http://redshift.vif.com Appendix I: A relativistic Shrödinger’s cat The spherical light propagation for all inertial observers imposed by the light postulate, besides being incompatible with the observed stellar aberration effect (as showed in this article), gives rise to the following paradox. Let us imagine a slightly modified version of the relativistic light clock, in which the wave source is a laser, and thus capable of emitting light not in a radial way, but in one single direction. Furthermore, imagine that along this direction, at a distance D from the source, there is a detector capable of releasing, if hit by a light pulse, a lethal gas in a box which contains a cat (Fig.7). At a given instant, the laser emits a light pulse towards the detector. According to an observer at rest with respect to this device, the light pulse reaches the detector after a time D c , and the cat dies. But according to an observer in perpendicular motion relative to the velocity of the light pulse, on the basis of the light postulate the light pulse does not reach the detector, because in the time this pulse travels the distance D, the detector has changed its place, travelling a distance vt, and, in absence of a radial emission, no spherical wave front can reach it. Therefore, according to the observer in motion, the cat does not die. We are therefore now facing a similar result to that obtained in the famous thought experiment conceived by Shrödinger to disprove Quantum Mechanics.† In fact, on the basis of the principles of the SRT, two observers do not view the same event at two different times (relativity of simultaneity), but view two different events, that is, two different realities! The Shrödinger paradox is usually solved by appealing to the inapplicability of Quantum laws to macrocosm systems, instead ruled by the entropy law. Our relativistic paradox takes instead place entirely in the macrocosmic world, and therefore a superposition of contradictory macroscopic events cannot be avoided. But simply because of this reason, it turns out to be unacceptable. ------- Harry
