Einstein and Schrodinger's Quest for a Unified Theory led to a Titanic Clash

StartsWithABang writes When it comes to the very nature of quantum mechanics — about the inherent uncertainty and indeterminism to reality — it's one of the most difficult things to accept. Perhaps, you imagine, there's some underlying cause, some hidden reality beneath what's visible that actually is deterministic. After all, a cat can't simultaneously be dead and alive until someone looks can it? That's one of the problems that both Einstein and Schrödinger wrestled with during their lives. An investigation of that story, their work on that front, and their friendship that ensued as both pursued that same end is thoroughly investigated here by physicist Paul Halpern.

Comments

Is there a fixed length for he

[clickety6]

...because this headline seems to have been cut sh

Titanic Cl

[Rhaban]

Iceberg Incom

The fucking cat

[WillKemp]

No, of course the cat can't be simultaneously alive and dead - that's Schrödinger's point.

I wish people would stop crapping on about that fucking cat when they have no idea what it means.

Re:The fucking cat

[iris-n]

I wish people would stop speculating about the fucking cat and just read what Schrödinger wrote. Come on, it's four paragraphs.

What Schrödinger is doing is pointing out how ridiculous it is to accept the "quantum blurring" because "it only affects microscopical particles anyway and they're just weird". The problem is that one cannot consistently keep the blurring confined to the atomic domain. As Schrödinger points out very clearly, if we accept that the atomic nucleus is "blurred", then this blurring can be easily amplified to the macroscopic domain and make the cat be simultaneously dead and alive. Since we don't observe cats to be blurred, we cannot accept atomic nucleus to be blurred.

That's what Schrödinger states one line after introducing the fucking cat. Since I know nobody is gonna click the link and RFTA I'm going to quote:

It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality.

Re:The fucking cat

[david_thornley]

We can't observe "quantum blurring" either. If we do the two-slit experiment with electrons, and measure which electron goes through which hole, they'll act just like particles. It's only if we don't observe electrons as particles that we can get interference patterns. We can't directly observe a particle being in an indeterminate state, but we can measure its state by translating it into something way above the photon level, like a photon detector or a cat. (Under ideal conditions, you've got about a 50% chance of detecting a burst of about 100 photons. This is as close to direct perception on the quantum level as you can get.)

Re:Not Hard To Imagine

[beerbear]

Fascinating! Now please pass the bong.

Stupid post modded up yet again

[Anonymous Coward]

A variation of this post gets copy-pasted to every single article with anything related to quantum mechanics, and inevitably seems to get modded up despite the fact it always gets shown to be completely wrong every time. Typical psuedo-science tactic of repeating things enough times hoping some of the time someone will forget or be too slow replying with the counter-points.

5. And thus it is detected ALL THE TIME BY EVERYTHING AROUND IT, long before you put it through a diffraction grating, or whatever test you dream up.

Stop using the pop-sci version of things where it is about being "detected" or not, and it comes down to whether it interacts with things in specific ways. Turns out the fact it has a magnetic field, or even that the wavefunction has infinite extent, doesn't cause it to be "detected" and there are plenty of ways interactions that can happen without "detection," whether with things like the slits in a double slit experiment, or more explicitly involving magnetic fields like the Aharonov–Bohm effect.

It's not, I know its not, but without my glasses, I can no longer see the individual birds, only a cluster big enough to fire the nerve in my retina.

That description would be apt, except for the fact that some interactions will then cause all of the birds at other locations to instantly disappear, or to change into other states. If readers are curious, they can look for much longer rebuttals of this in response to many of your other posts, but it makes it look like you've only read about quantum mechanics from news outlets, and not an actual text book or class notes.

They can only be created and observed that way, so they must only exist that way.

Oh, maybe your the same AC that has been saying photons can only be created or seen by discrete processes of changing electron levels in atoms. That is flat out wrong, as there are several processes the photons can be created or detected by, some of which are continuous (e.g. scattering and bremsstrahlung).

I think the sun and planets go around the earth, I make an equation to explain the weird loop-the-loops that planets do.

Of course you can make an equation with "loop-the-loops" or epicycles, but the only way to get it to match observations would be an infinite series that ends up matching the actual paths they make around the sun. Just like any function can be broken down into components by Fourier transform or many other transforms, whether or not it makes sense to a given situation, but you still make the same predictions in the end with the full series.

But go ahead, keep reposting your BS, over the last couple years you've managed to get +5 before someone notices sometimes, or even get a few by without any replies if you post them to a story late enough.

Re:Sure

[fermion]

This is the nature of science, which in many respect only fully matured at beginning of the 20th century when all this was happening. It depends on observation, and without observation all one has is religion.

Here is what is now thought when science is done. An observation is made. If we take Galileo as an example, he observed bones in animals. Then We make a mathematical model. In that case it was the relationship between mass the bone volume that was needed to support the mass. Then we make testable predictions based on that model, Galileo made the prediction that Giants do not exist, which is true, and could not have existed, which is one of the things that made the Church mad.

Relativity and Quantum mechanics both depend heavily on the mathematical model to make predictions on things that are not part of our everyday experience. This is different from classical physics where the mathematical models were based on things that most people observe. Classical physics is a ball falling and bouncing off the floor or light refracting through a prism. Quantum mechanics is a ball tunneling through the floor or light refracting around a galaxy. What I find interesting is that people take Relativity at face value and have a problem with Quantum Mechanics. It is true that we see a limit in velocity in the macroscopic world, but that has to do with friction, not relativity. There is nothing in our experience that says we cannot go as fast as we have the energy to accelerate. Certainly our mass does not increase if we are traveling at 80 miles and hour in a car instead of 30 miles an hour.

OTOH, our experience does tell us that second and third hand information is unreliable, and we are often better off making direct observations if possible. Are we just going to let some stranger bury our cat on the statement the cat fell off the roof and died? No, we want to see the cat, and until we do we hope the cat is alive, but there is chance the cat is dead. Is it both? No, it is uncertain, which is the key thing that people do not learn about science. Uncertainty.

In Quantum Mechanics this is called a wave function, and the cat is in a superposition of wave functions that represent all possible states. The wave function collapses when we make an observation.

Here is another interesting thing. Quantum Mechanics came about to a problem with infinity. Relativity never solved it's problem with infinity, at least not completely, and when combined with Quantum Mechanics develops more infinities. This is what does not make sense.