(November 5, 2014 at 12:40 pm)pocaracas Wrote:(November 5, 2014 at 12:23 pm)ManMachine Wrote: You have so missed the point of the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment.I'm sorry if I was taught physics in the wrong school... but that's how I learned it... or how I understood the teaching...
The point is to establish the existence of a superposition, the cat is in a state of being both alive and dead at the same time, not one or the other.
MM
The point was that we can't know in which state the cat is, so we attribute a probability to each of the possible states.... and that (If I remember correctly) is the wave function that goes into the Schrödinger equation.
It's a little more subtle than that, Schrodinger is not telling us that we are uncertain about it's state but that uncertainty is a fundamental characteristic of the state in which Quanta exist.
MM
"The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions" - Leonardo da Vinci
"I think I use the term “radical” rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as “atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean atheist, I really do not believe that there is a god; in fact, I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one ... etc., etc. It’s easier to say that I am a radical atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously." - Douglas Adams (and I echo the sentiment)
"I think I use the term “radical” rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as “atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean atheist, I really do not believe that there is a god; in fact, I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one ... etc., etc. It’s easier to say that I am a radical atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously." - Douglas Adams (and I echo the sentiment)
