Defining "Atheism"

[Tiberius]

"when we look in the box" isn't a possibility.

Are you talking about your comparison to God now? Coz I was just talking about the physics thought experiment...

[fr0d0]

No I was talking about the experiment - looking inside the box isn't part of the experiment.

[Tiberius]

It isn't part of the original thought experiment, no, but it is included in many of the interpretations of the experiment, since what happens after the box is opened is important.

[theVOID]

The cat is either dead or alive, it's as simple as that, the whole point is that we could not know the outcome of a random event until we have observed it.

Erm, that's not how I learned it. From Wikipedia:

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead.

Then again, I'm not a physicist, and I prepare to stand corrected.

That was a 'problem' that Schroedinger had with the Copenhagen interpretation because if it was true that you need an observer to collapse a wavefunction then the cat would be both dead within the potential scope of the system. Schroedinger rightly pointed out the paradox, and suggested that it needed to be resolved because as it stood the Copenhagen Interpretation could easily become a paradox.

This old school understanding of wave function collapses isn't accurate though, we now know that 'observers' are anything that interacts and causes a state change in the quantum system. The release of the radioactive material that triggered the release of the poison would be in it's self an 'observer' and cause the superposition of quantum states to resolve all by it's self.

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It isn't part of the original thought experiment, no, but it is included in many of the interpretations of the experiment, since what happens after the box is opened is important.

Only for someone who wants to know if the cat is dead or alive. The 'important' stuff has already happened.